Curious, Healing

Recommended to me by: Noticing it on my bookshelf

I have one remaining shelf of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, winnowed down over the years from my avid teen collection. Most of them are deeply familiar, authors like Le Guin, Lindholm, MacAvoy, McKillip. I was idly looking at the beginning of the alphabet and noticed this one, which I didn’t really remember. I must have picked it up at a book sale and kept it out of fondness for Susan Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” series.

This is a portal fantasy with fairy tale themes. Two young people in great distress over the loss of their parents find themselves in a different world. Westerly and Cally soon meet up with each other and travel together. They also meet two powerful and mercurial figures that are in conflict with them and each other.

I liked the world-building, the movement of the plot, and the ambiguous villains and helpers. No simplistic good and evil here. The young people are around 16 and are referred to as children even while traveling and surviving a difficult world, competent but not falsely assumed to be adults.

They explicitly call out gender dynamics when the boy assumes he can take the lead and try to protect the girl. Of the two powerful figures, the man is more caring toward the children and the woman is more dangerous.

The children undertake a long and arduous journey to reach the sea (thus the title). In the end, the travel seems to have been for their education, which feels patronizing to me as a middle-aged reader, but makes more sense for teens. The journeying reminded me of George Macdonald’s The Golden Key, although not as heavy-handed with the moralizing.

The ending left me curious about what happened later for Cally and Westerly.

People have written fanfiction about it, such as The Unending Swell of the Sea by silveronthetree.

Available at bookshop.org.