John Dollar: A Novel

Young widowed Charlotte Lewes leaves World War I England for Burma, falls in love with sailor John Dollar, and becomes marooned with him--and eight children--on a remote island From School Library Journal. YA-- Described by the author as a "female Lord of the Flies ," this book is every bit as chilling and brutal as Golding's. It is around 1919 and Charlotte, a young widow, takes on the job of tutoring the daughters of British subjects in Burma. She enters into a passionate affair with John Dollar, captain of a small ship. Soon a foreshadowing of the savagery to come occurs on an apparently genteel picnic when the migration of sea turtles to lay their eggs on the beach becomes a blood bath. In very quick order a tidal wave strikes, the young girls are left to survive on their own with a paralyzed John Dollar, and a group with no code of behavior or morals drifts into shocking cannibalism. The last 20 pages of the book are spine tingling. Wiggins (wife of Salman Rushdie) has given her readers an uncomfortably clear picture of a society in which great gentility and dark human conduct coexist. It is both thought-provoking and horrifying. Its dark, disturbing message about life on a primitive, lawless basis is neither easy to acknowledge nor easy to dismiss. - Barbara Weathers, Duchesne Academy, Houston. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.