Journey to the River Sea

(Stand alone, juvenile, fiction)

This was an engaging story, set in the early 20th century, about a young girl called Maia who is enrolled at the Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies, an unusually progressive school for 1910. Maia, who is clever, brave and inquisitive, has spent all her holidays for the past two years at the school since being orphaned and the story opens on the day she is to find out if her guardian and lawyer, Mr. Murray, has managed to find relatives who will offer her a home.

'Well, Maia, we have good news,' said Miss Banks. A frightening woman to many, now in her sixties, with an amazing bust which would have done splendidly on the prow of a sailing ship, she smiled at the girl standing in front of her. A clever child

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and a brave one, who had fought hard to overcome the devastating blow of her parents' death in a train crash in Egypt two years earlier. The staff knew how Maia had wept, night after night under her pillow, trying not to wake her friends. If good fortune was to come her way, there was no one who deserved it more.

She is told that some distant relatives willing to offer her a home have been found, who live in the city of Manaus with its magnificent gold-domed theatre, deep in the Amazonian rainforest. When she looks it up in the school library, she imagines the colourful flora and fauna and the adventures she will have with her twin cousins. Sadly, when she gets there, she finds the reality quite different, as the Carters refuse to adapt to their surroundings, closing them out and attempting to live as they did in England.

But despite them, Maia - who has a love of life - makes friends, especially with two other orphans whom she tries to help to happy endings. Fortunately, she also has adults on her side who recognise her worth, namely in the shape of Miss Minton, her governess, and Mr. Murray. And she does get to explore the Amazon River, the River Sea of the title.

Beautifully written, engaging, lightly suspenseful and amusing. Deserved winner of the Nestlé Children's Book gold prize.

5 stars show less

English orphan Maia Fielding is sent with her governess, Miss Minton, to live with relatives on the Amazon near Manaus, Brazil. There are twin cousins, Gwendolyn and Beatrice who are mean to her and their parents who hate Brazil, but take her in because of the allowance they get from her inheritance. She meets an acting company on the journey and befriends a boy actor named Clovis, whose voice is changing and jeopardizing his roles as a child. She defies her cousins rules to befriend the native servants and workers, including a mysterious boy, Finn, who lives in the jungle. When Clovis and Finn run into problems, Maia gets involved. This is a great adventure story about a girl who wants to belong in a family, but is also intrigued by show more new things and the world around her. show less

Eva Ibbotson, if still with us, would have been celebrating her 90th birthday in January 2015, but sadly she died in 2010. Born in Vienna, she had to move to England in 1935 when Hitler came to power. That experience -- of being uprooted -- was drawn on directly for novels like The Morning Gift (about a girl from a secular Jewish family escaping Nazi Germany) and indirectly, I suspect, for Maia, the young protagonist of Journey to the River Sea. Who has not imagined what life might be like if one was an orphan forced from their familiar environment? Ibbotson experienced some of this, while the fictional Maia is a genuine orphan -- not impecunious, it is true -- who at the beginning of the 20th century has to travel away from her show more boarding school to live with distant relatives. On the banks of the Amazon.

When I was a kid growing up in the early 60s my mother had a collection of ethnographic travel books, many about the 'lost worlds' of the Amazon. They had titles like Exploration Fawcett or involved a quest for the mysterious city of El Dorado. They had photographs of naked forest-dwellers in dug-out canoes or by their huts staring at the camera. And, I suspect, they had that classic National Geographic paternalistic stance towards benighted natives paraded before civilised eyes. Earlier in the century, when empires were still carving out new territories for exploration (corporations do that now) locals were often regarded by Europeans as heathen, dirty, lazy cheats, both primitive and incorrigible. And that is the attitude that Maia discovers underpins her newfound relatives living near Manaus, a thousand miles upriver.

This is the Carter family: an unsuccessful rubber plantation owner so obsessed with his glass eye collection that he is blind to impending financial disaster; his vapid but overbearing wife focused only on sanitation; and their two children, twins Beatrice and Gwendolyn. (The latter made me wonder if Ibbotson borrowed the latter's name from the equally objectionable Gwendolen in Diana Wynne Jones' Charmed Life.) Maia briefly considers whether they will be like the two Ugly Sisters in Cinderella but then dismisses the thought when she first meets them. In fact this really is a Cinderella story, and while Ibbotson never labours the parallels that is the trope we inevitably have in the back of our minds. The two sisters are indeed spiteful, the foster parents disregard or look down on her, she is indeed the belle of the ball in Manaus, she has a 'fairy godmother' in the shape of Miss Minton, the governess who tutors Maia and the twins, and through Minty's machinations Maia is able to slip away on occasion to befriend the Carter's workers and meet up with her 'prince'.

Maia is a genuine girl, one who is intelligent, curious and good-hearted, a character who is both believable and one in whom we willingly invest our sympathy. The Carters would be caricatures if we didn't in fact all know people just like that: self-centred, greedy, empty headed, cruel or any combination of these traits. And need I mention xenophobic? Miss Minton (a stern governess in a Mary Poppins sort of way) might almost also veer towards caricature if it wasn't for the fact that she has a heart-breaking secret of her own that we hope for her sake will be resolved (the clues are in the text, if we notice).

And the two principal boys who appear in Maia's life seem to have their own mysteries. One is Clovis King, a stage name, borrowed from the first monarch who united Gaul after the fall of the Western Roman Empire; he comes to the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus to play Little Lord Fauntleroy, a significant role and a significant name too: Clovis is called on to play the part of a missing young milord, while 'Fauntleroy' suggests the derivation enfant le roi, 'the child king'. The second is a young Brazilian Indian whom Maia encounters, but is he whom he seems to be?

Journey to the River Sea is a beautifully written novel, deserving its many accolades. As with so many young adult novels the protagonist has to find her way in the world through her own courage, gifts and wits, with just a little help from a few friendly helpers. She is the classic 'outsider' who doesn't appear to fit the mould: she looks different, loves books and, above all, is an orphan. (In fact, as we see, most of the children mentioned in this tale lose or have lost one or both of their parents.) Forget that we have a few possible literary trope borrowings (I suspect Peter Pan and Tarzan and The Jungle Book might have been distant influences, as well as the aforementioned Mary Poppins, Cinderella and, obviously, Little Lord Fauntleroy); it's what Ibbotson chooses to do with these themes that make this both unputdownable and rarely predictable.

Add to all this the book's central setting in the early 20th-century Amazonian forest, with its distinctive sounds, smells, sights and experiences, juxtaposed with the accoutrements of Western civilisation: dancing and music, grand houses and shops, all symbolised by the incredible building that is the Manaus Opera House. In the theatre one observes everything from high drama to comedy, pathos to bathos, and so it is with Ibbotson's novel; laughter is here, but so is death; wins as well as setbacks. If the course of novel conforms to the Voyage and Return plot (out from England to Brazil and back again), the final sentence -- "'We are all going home,' she said." -- promises that all is not over for Maia and her companions, and that the rest of their lives beckons. And if our hearts don't swell at that then we must truly be stick-in-the-mud individuals.

Many editions of this novel include an exotic butterfly or two on the cover; though butterflies are one of the many, many plot drivers the choice of this creature as a decorative features reminds me of that famous notion, the so-called Butterfly Effect of chaos theory, where a small local disturbance (a butterfly flapping its wings in a jungle, say) can ultimately give rise to more complex phenomenon (a hurricane in another part of the world, for example). So it is that little happenings in Maia's life have unintended consequences on the people she comes, however obliquely, in contact with.

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Maia is an orphan in London, in the early 1900s. She is in a boarding school where she has many friends and is beloved by the teachers and staff. Her family’s solicitor has finally found some distant relatives who have agreed to take Maia in … however, she’ll have to leave her school and go to Brazil where the Carters have a rubber plantation. It so happens they have just hired a new governess for their twin daughters, so Maia and Miss Minton will make the long journey together. While she is sad to leave her friends at school, Maia is excited by the possible adventure of living in a jungle setting, and she reads about the Amazon and Brazil to prepare herself for her new life. What she finds, however, is far from her imagined show more situation.

What a lovely adventure / coming-of-age story! Maia is a strong female character – intelligent, kind, generous, brave, resourceful and loyal. I loved how she reserved judgment until she was certain of the facts, and even when faced with greedy, spiteful people she maintained her dignity and, with the help of Miss Minton, found a way around obstacles. Her willingness to explore and learn about the native culture was also a fine lesson. And I liked the way Ibbotson made heroes out of some unlikely characters.

I did think the Carter family – father, mother, and twins – were rather stereotypical “villains,” but that is a small quibble. This is a children’s book, after all, and I don’t expect the same subtleties that I would in literature written for adults.

Occasional illustrations by Kevin Hawkes really lend atmosphere to the book. show less

3.75 stars

It is the early 1900s and Maia is an orphan in England, though she was left plenty of money. Some family are found in Brazil on the Amazon, so she is sent there to live with them. A governess, Miss Minton, is sent with her. Maia is looking forward to the adventure and excited to meet her aunt, uncle and cousins - twin sisters - but when she arrives, she finds that although the Carters are living on the Amazon, they are trying to avoid it as much as possible. Everything they have and eat comes from England, and they are rarely outside. How disappointing for Maia, who was looking forward to running in the jungle and exploring.

This was really enjoyable. I liked Maia's independence, and I liked Miss Minton. In a lot of children's show more lit, the adults don't really play any part in helping solve anything. In this one, they weren't the main part of it, but they helped. I liked that, too. There wasn't as much to learn about the Amazon and the animals in it as I'd hoped, but it is a nice book to learn some tolerance of other peoples and cultures. show less

Accompanied by Miss Minton, a fierce-looking, no-nonsense governess, Maia, a young orphan, sets off for the wilderness of the Amazon, expecting curtains of orchids, brightly colored macaws, and a loving family. But what she finds is an evil-tempered aunt and uncle and their spoiled daughters. It is only when she is swept up in a mystery involving a young Indian boy, a homesick child actor, and a missing inheritance that Maia lands in the middle of the Amazon adventure she's dreamed of.

A wonderful story about finding what you never knew you were looking for. The story brings to life all different aspects of existence in the Amazon, and stages an epic battle between the two forces at work there--the 'civilized' world trying to tame and contain it, and the 'savage' world only trying to understand its beauty. Reminiscent of The Secret Garden, this is another story of a English orphan who is moved out of her element, forced into a quiet and sterile environment, who refuses not to shine. With a wonderful happy ending and the perfect amount of vengence for all wrongs done, this is a gem for both young readers and those who still feel young.