The quest for freedom, the burden of Motherhood, loss, and the inevitability of fate are the things Ruth, her friends and her daughter Ori must cope with. I really like the depiction of the rawness of the coastal landscape and the unconventional people that inhabit this beautiful story.
Ori climbs down inside her sleeping bag, dampens Ruth's face with her breath. Go to sleep, she whispers, go to sleep.
A story, Ori whispers back. Just a little one. A story, Mama. Her mind goes blank, clears, blanks again. On the boat over, the spray blew in wafts off the sea and coated their open-mouthed faces as they clutched hands and shouted in glee. The island occluded, flashed in and out of vision, and each time it was taken from sight she thought perhaps she had imagined it all along. It was not real. And then, there, again, and the bottom of the boat scraping onto the rocky beach, and the motor cutting out beneath her clamped grip.
What a grand adventure, she kept telling Ori, and Ori would rock on the damp seat and repeat her words. A grand, grand adventure.
Once upon a time, Ruth says, there was an island.
The roof of the tent shivers. She cannot believe they are here. She cannot believe it. She feels it ahead of her, running forward, everything that this place might be.
