Book Recommendation: THE GREAT WIDE SEA

Hatchet.  My Side of the Mountain.  Island of the Blue Dolphins.  I’ve been waiting for a great survival story to arrive, following in the footsteps of these classics.  So when I saw The Great Wide Sea on the shelves of a Bainbridge Island bookstore, I snapped it up and went for a sail.

What would you do if, in the wake of tragedy, your father announced that he's going to sell your house, get rid of nearly all of your possessions, move your family aboard a thirty-foot-long sailboat, and head out to the islands of Bermuda?  The Great Wide Sea is the debut novel of M.H. Herlong, and it follows three brothers—Ben, Dylan, and young Jerry—on a wild ride through the Atlantic Ocean, from the Bahamas to the seas south of Bermuda.  I grew up sailing, and Herlong’s passion for all things sail is evident from the first chapter.  (According to the author note, he’s sailed many of the areas where the story takes place.)

If you’re thinking that life without classrooms and cars and computers sounds pretty nice…well, the beginning of the trip does have many idyllic moments:

At one island, we gathered lobster just like the Bahamians did.  At another, we watched sharks cruising after a fishing boat.  At another, we found a coconut and ate it…Each island was small and perfect.  Each one was our anchorage for days and days.” (115)

But all the while a conflict between Ben and his father is simmering, and occasionally erupting.  Both of them are reeling from the sudden death of Ben’s mom, and Ben’s increasingly frustrated with his father’s erratic and dictatorial behavior.  But it’s the disappearance of the boys’ father one night in the middle of the ocean that really sets the novel in motion.  The three brothers must survive a wicked storm, a shipwreck, and life on an island somewhere in the Bahamas.

It’s the combination of these conflicts—the clashes with his dad, the loss of his mom, the storm, the shipwreck, the suffering of his brothers he’s powerless to alleviate—that nearly drives Ben over the edge.  But The Great Wide Sea is as much about pressing on as about the struggle.  As Ben explains,

The thing about life is that it goes on.  You wake up and there is the sun like always.  There is your own body with bad breath and bruises and a headache.  You have to pee.  You have to get a drink.  No matter what happened the day before, you wake up and there is life and you have to do something about it. (173)

This paragraph gets to the root of any great survival story.  It’s not just about surviving the elements, it’s about surviving all the other twists life might throw at you.  Maybe that’s why survival stories will always hold an important place in literature.  They remind us of our power to be extraordinary, to find courage when we feel emptied and battered, to rise above any of the storms life may throw at us, whatever form they may take.

(Herlong, M.H.  The Great Wide Sea.  New York: Puffin Books, 2010.)