Hurricane Child

CC0 Public Domain

This book is bright and sharp, sparkling and ghostly. It smells like salt and sweat, and feels like holding hands, like running, like catching odd glimpses in the corners of your eyes. Caroline lives on Water Island, a small island close to St. Thomas in the USVI. She has dark black skin, her father's long thin arms and legs, and her mother's eyes, with which she has seen ghosts and spirits for almost as long as she can remember. What is a more recent disruption of her life, though, is an absence rather than a presence: one year and three months ago, her mother left Caroline and her father without saying goodbye. Despite her immense personal determination and power, Caroline is nevertheless teased by her classmates, shamed by her teacher, and often forgotten to a greater or lesser extent by her father.

Caroline’s story is told in an immediate, gripping first person that is well-paced for a middle grade reader, with enough plot twists and suspense to give momentum to a novel otherwise focused more on emotion and interiority. Lines from Nina Simone’s Blackbird thread their way through the novel like another spirit, as the lines aren’t attributed to Simone until the end, and some young readers may not understand where the evocative, italicized lines are coming from, even while feeling how deeply they reflect Caroline’s sense that “[n]o one cares about someone like me, and no one cares that I’m angry about that either” (145).

Her feelings of not belonging only increase when she meets Kalinda Francis, the new girl at school who arrives from Barbados with a head full of beautifully twisted locks and a way of making even the bullies respect her. Not only does Kalinda become Caroline’s first ever friend, she also becomes the first person Caroline falls in love with. Met with the response that this kind of love is a sin, Caroline feels that she is the truest blackbird: abandoned by her mother, uncherished by her father, and rejected by her love.

While there are many aspects of Hurricane Child that gave me a window into another experience rather than a mirror reflecting back my own, Caroline’s feelings for Kalinda absolutely mirrored home to me my own first experience, as a ten/eleven-year-old, of falling in love with the new girl in my own classroom. What sets Caroline’s experience apart from mine, however—what made Hurricane Child such a personally inspiring and motivating book, is the way Caroline is an advocate for herself—not necessarily without fear or hesitation, not without being tempted to opt for an easier lie or omission, but ultimately she always shows up for herself: she tells the bullies to step off, tells Kalinda exactly how she feels about her, she seeks out the mother who left her, demands the truth about this abandonment, and then sets the boundaries for their relationship going forward. Caroline is her own guardian angel, and surely an angel for many readers, too.

Subjects this book includes which some readers may be sensitive to: abandonment by a parent; homophobia