Where the world ends

For a few weeks every summer, Quilliam is sent with other men and boys to go fowling on the sea stacs in the St. Kilda archipelago. These rock formations are more remote and desolate than their own island home of Hirta, off the coast of Scotland, but the birds they harvest--gannets, fulmars, storm petrels--will help their families through the winter. This year, 1727, the expedition begins as planned. But then the boat that's supposed to take them back to Hirta doesn't arrive. Suddenly, the group is staring down the likelihood of having to survive through the winter--and maybe longer. As they chafe against a lump of rock that seems both entirely daunting and too small, one unsettling question lingers: What happened back home to keep the boat from coming? McCaughrean, who won the Printz Award for The White Darkness (2007), slips into the cracks of the human soul, dissecting with compassion the many paths that a person might take when confronted with such a challenge. The design of the book is as austere as its subject--stark line drawings of birds fill the endpapers and chapter titles--and, in an afterword, McCaughrean describes the tragic true story that inspired her own. Though this story is desperately sad at times, it glistens, too, propelled by the notion that where there is life, there is always, always hope.

In this Carnegie-winning novel, McCaughrean (The Middle of Nowhere, 2013, etc.) turns a small piece of history into an epic, nearly mythic, tale.St. Kilda's archipelago, far off the northwest corner of Scotland, is the most remote set of islands in Great Britain. In 1727, a boat set off from the sole occupied island, Hirta, dropping a small group of men and boys at Warrior Stac, a giant rock, for a fowling expedition. Told from the point of view of Quilliam, one of the older boys, (precise ages are never given; the boys seem to range in age from around 10 to about 16), the trip begins as a grand adventure: scaling cliffs via fingertip holds, making candles out of dead storm petrels, and cutting the stomachs out of gannets to use as bottles for oil. But then, inexplicably, the village boat does not return for them. As the weeks stretch to months and the birds begin to leave the rock, the party fears the end of the world. Cane, one of the men, sets himself up as a divine authority, praying for repentance, while Quill attempts to soothe the younger boys through storyand himself through memories of a young woman he loves. McCaughrean takes the bones of a real event, wraps it in immersive, imaginative detail and thoroughly real emotion, and creates an unforgettable tale of human survival.A masterpiece. (map, afterword, birds of St. Kilda, glossary) (Historical fiction. 12-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.