Journey to the River Sea

Eva Ibbotson's Journey to the River Sea is an adventure for 9 year olds in which a thirteen year old is packed off to the Amazon and decides, on purpose, to be delighted by it.

What happens

The year is 1910. Maia is thirteen and has spent two years at a London boarding school, holidays included, because her parents were killed in a train crash in Egypt.

Then her guardian tracks down some relatives. They will have her. They have twin daughters her age. They also happen to live on the Amazon, a thousand miles upriver from the sea.

Her classmates are thrilled for about four seconds and then start helpfully listing things. Alligators that take your head off in one bite. Piranhas that strip the flesh off your bones. Mosquitoes that turn you yellow. Poisoned arrows. Jaguars. All of it.

So Maia asks to go to the library after supper, and she reads and reads until the matron finds her long after bedtime. The next day she stands up in that same geography lesson and gives them a completely different Amazon. Scarlet birds. Rivers that run black and brown and blue. Capybaras you can tame. A city with a theatre roofed in green and gold.

That moment is what the book is really about. She is frightened. She reads her way out of it. Then she says out loud, in front of everybody, that it is going to be all right.

The other reason to love this is Miss Minton, the governess sent to travel out with her. She is bony and gaunt and Maia's friends think she looks like a nutcracker. She once broke her umbrella over a boy who was hurting a puppy, was sacked for it without a reference, and tells Maia all this in the cab on the way to the docks without a flicker.

The two of them together are a joy.

A note on the sadness. Maia's parents are dead before page one and she has cried herself to sleep for two years. The book says so plainly rather than dwelling on it, and Maia is brave rather than pitiable. If your reader is fine with an orphan heroine, and plenty are, this will not be the hard part.

There is also the period to think about. The story is set in 1910 and the schoolgirls talk about the rainforest and the people who live there the way Edwardians did. Maia is the one arguing for wonder instead of fear, which helps, but it is worth a conversation.

What to read next

If they want another Ibbotson with a child sent away from home who finds somewhere far better than expected, The Dragonfly Pool opens in London in 1939 with Tally being packed off to a very odd boarding school indeed.