Before You Begin

Before you begin.

A ship lies becalmed beneath the Southern Cross. Two eight-year-old cousins, Dick and Emmeline Lestrange, play below decks while an old Irish sailor spins impossible stories in the forecastle. Then smoke begins to turn around the mainmast, a wall of Pacific fog closes in, and the known world falls away.

H. de Vere Stacpoole published The Blue Lagoon in 1908, bringing a physician's attention to bodies and instincts together with a sea writer's feeling for weather, current, reef and sail. The novel moves between adventure, fable and a provocative thought experiment: what might childhood become when nature, rather than society, supplies its rules?

The island is never merely a backdrop. Its lagoon shelters and threatens; its reef records time; its birds, storms, coral and tides become teachers. Objects rescued almost by accident—a tiny tea service, a box of fishhooks, a battered dinghy—carry fragments of one world into another.

Read slowly enough to notice those fragments. The illustrated gallery that follows maps the people, places and material clues of the story without taking away the discoveries ahead. Beyond it waits a novel of survival, innocence, memory and the immense blue distances between loss and return.