Adrift
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- £7.49
Publisher Description
From Tanya Guerrero, the author of All You Knead Is Love and How to Make Friends with the Sea, comes Adrift, an upper middle grade contemporary story of survival and grief about two biracial Filipino cousins whose resilience is tested when one of them is lost at sea.
Cousins Coral and Isa are so close that they're practically siblings; their mothers are sisters, and the two girls grew up on the same small island. When Coral and her parents leave on a months-long sea voyage amid the islands of Indonesia, Isa is devastated that they'll be kept apart, and the two vow to write to each other no matter what.
Then the unthinkable happens, and Coral's boat capsizes at sea, where her parents vanish. Washed up on a deserted island, alone and wracked by grief, she must find the strength within to survive, and find her way back home. Meanwhile, Isa is still on Pebble Island, the only one holding out hope that her beloved cousin is still alive.
Told in alternating points of view, this is a powerful story of loss and hope, love and family—and the unexpected resilience of the human spirit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Family serves as the heart of this tender novel, which follows two tightly bonded cousins across a devastating separation. The daughters of two Filipina sisters married to two white-cued American brothers, "Star Sisters" Coral and Isa have been inseparable since birth, raised together on Pebble Island, N.Y. But a crisis strikes during Coral's family sailing trip, when an earthquake in Indonesia causes a tidal wave that capsizes their boat. No survivors are reported, but Isa, unwilling to give up hope, is certain that Coral is alive: "I can feel her presence inside me, in my bones, in my gut, in my heart." And she's right: Coral is stranded alone on an island with a survival kit and a few days' rations, attempting to endure until help arrives. Employing the cousins' alternating first-person voices to portray their situations and their love across space and time, Guerrero (All You Knead Is Love) movingly portrays the toll of resilience, sorrow, and survival, seamlessly including Filipino cultural references throughout. Ages 8–12.
