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jacey
A story that takes place in two timelines, centuries apart. Gil in 1968 and Mayken in 1628 on a doomed Dutch East India Company ship called the Batavia after the place it’s heading. (Batavia is now Jakarta.). In 1968 Gil, age nine, has come to a small seasonal fishing community on one of the Abrolhos Islands, off the west coast of Australia, to live with his curmudgeonly grandfather Joss, after his feckless mother has died. Gil is maladjusted after the circumstances of his mother’s death, and his grandfather doesn’t help much at first, being in the middle of a feud with one of the other fishing families. Gil manages to get himself firmly embroiled in the feud. Back in 1628 Mayken’s mother had died and her voyage (to join her father) embodies a fictionalised account of an infamous shipwreck and the terrible events that followed, when the survivors washed up on the inhospitable island. But before the wreck we follow Mayken, a bit of a wild child, as she explores the ship, and tries to catch a mythical shadow monster. The two stories run side by side. In 1968 there is an archaeological team digging the wreck, so Gil reads about the shipwreck and believes that Little May’s ghost haunts the island. The writing is elegant, but dark. The pace is measured. While Gil’s story is grim, it has a satisfying ending, however, we know from the start that Mayken/Little May did not survive the wreck and subsequent marooning of the Batavia’s survivors, but her story is still compelling. 
