A review by abbynlewis
Where the World Ends by Geraldine McCaughrean

dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

3.0

 

Where the World Ends is set on the island of St. Kilda, off the coast of Scotland. A group of boys and three adult men are delivered to Warrior stac, which is less of an island and more of a rock (featured on the book cover) jutting out of the ocean. On the stac, the boys and men are meant to harvest the local birds for profit. This includes killing gannet, puffin, and garefowl for meat and for the oil in the birds’ stomachs, which they will sell when they are picked up and returned to the main island. This is how the people of the St. Kilda archipelagos make a living. However, this time, no one comes to pick them up.

There’s a lot to love in this book, but there are also several drawbacks. The writing itself is lovely, and the book design is gorgeous in terms of the cover art and the inner binding (pictured below). The genre of historical young adult fiction is a hefty challenge in and of itself to write. Historical fiction alone is a difficult subject to craft, but to then add the feat of making the historical facts and setting palatable and even entertaining for a younger audience is not a simple task. McCaughrean does a valiant job of incorporating terms of the time, such as “bothy,” “cleit,” and “kirk”–which are helpfully included in a glossary at the end of the book–and a specific dialect that isn’t too hard to understand. For a book based in the year 1727, the tone was deceptively modern. 

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