Of Course

Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy - the only thing that ruined this book for me was the buzz. I don’t like to follow the crowd but I previously read Migrations and Once There Were Wolves by this author and could barely wait for her new one. To say I liked them is an understatement. They upped my reading game. They were hard to follow. (Thank goodness for Jane Kirkpatrick’s latest.) I feel like I only want to read books as good as these now. 

Wow. She did it again. I think this book was even better than the other two, and that’s saying a lot. It mostly takes place on fictional Shearwater Island where the global seed vault is located. For various reasons and at various times everyone except the Salt family leave. We meet dad Dominic and his children Raff, Fen, and Orly. They are left on the island as the sole caretakers of the world’s replenishment of food and plant seeds should everything else perish. 

One day Fen sees a lump in the water and retrieves it only to find it is a human being. A woman, Rowan, who was trying to get to the island in search of her husband who worked there. She, the boat, and it’s captain were ravaged by an ocean storm and she is barely alive (the captain wasn’t so lucky).  Dominic and his children treat her wounds, stitch her body back together and take care of her the best they can. 

With the seawater rising, life and the seed vault cannot be sustained on the island, and in a matter of weeks ships, workers and equipment will come to take everything off the island before it is all washed away. In that time Rowan finds out more about this man and each of his children, and eventually what happened to her husband.

While reading this book, I got the feeling that these characters were real people. You get so invested. Their lives felt real, their pain and their memories felt real. You feel bad for their losses, their hardships and their impending removal from a place they love and call home. You feel the wind. The overwhelming strength of the sea, and the importance of their mission. You’re almost exhausted when they are. They moved a mother whale and her baby who were stranded on the shore! They saved them. Who can’t help but to love a book (and its characters) like that? 

Wonderful.

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