★★★★☆ The best ending

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle

Avi

Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle is the story of Charlotte Doyle's Hellish crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in the summer of 1832. As the publisher's blurb tells us, "What begins as an eagerly anticipated ocean crossing turns into a harrowing journey, where Charlotte gains a villainous enemy . . . and is put on trial for murder!". It's a rousing nautical adventure. The ending is just perfect. By that I mean not just HOW it ends, but THAT it ends. This Scholastic edition includes a preface written by Avi in 2002, that ends thus

The book has proved to be very popular — so popular I have been asked to write a sequel many times. I won’t. Here’s why:

In the course of the story, Charlotte learns to think for herself, to choose her own destiny. I like to think that unfolding openness is a key part of the tale.

My writer’s job was to set Charlotte on her life’s voyage. I say, may she be given a different life by everyone who has taken her to heart. And may each reader go forth with her.

He got this exactly right. Any sequel would diminish Charlotte.

Now, I confess to some uneasiness about Charlotte . In the course of the story she joins the crew of the Sparrowhawk and goes before the mast, donning canvas trousers and cutting her hair. She is not in disguise -- everyone knows she's a girl. But nevertheless she's a girl doing a job usually reserved for boys. Indeed, in her murder trial much is made of how unusual/unnatural she is. Stories about girls playing boys' roles are hundreds of years old -- ballads of Hua Mulan date to before the 6th century, and surely such stories have been told for as long as people have been telling stories.

These stories make me uneasy, because they feel to me like what my best friend has called "wrong ideas of feminism", by which I think she means the idea that, in order to be complete, a girl has to abjure femininity and become more like a boy. (Indeed, in this novel Charlotte gets almost a complete personality transplant when she goes before the mast.) Many of these stories give the feeling of suggesting that to be courageous and free, a girl has to become boy-like. And that bothers me. I am more comfortable with heroines like Stuart Gibbs's Charlie Thorne, or Nancy Springer's Enola Holmes.

Perhaps this is a "me" problem.

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