Drift House: The First Voyage (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Drift House: The First Voyage Karen Coats Peck, Dale Drift House: The First Voyage. Bloomsbury, 2005437p ISBN 1-58234-969-X$16.95 Ad Gr. 5-8 After 9/11, Susan, Charles, and Murray are sent to Canada to stay with their uncle Farley in his mansion on the shores of the Bay of Eternity. Little do they know that the house is really a transtemporal vessel and that they will soon find themselves adrift on the Sea of Time. Here, some rather nasty mermaids enlist Susan to rescue their sister from Sea Pirates; when she handily accomplishes this feat, the mermaids' Queen Octavia (who is more octopus than mermaid) then forces her to set off on the real mission—to stop time altogether by closing the Great Drain in the Sea of Time, at the cost of her life. A wise whale, a crusty multilingual parrot, Susan's brothers, and the head Sea Pirate himself all help to thwart the mermaids' plans and restore navigation capability to Drift House, with the promise of more adventures to come. The children are a rather clichéd ensemble—shades of classic children's fantasy from Nesbit to Lewis to L'Engle, etc., render familiar the haughty, resourceful elder sibling, the mechanically handy but sullen middle child, and the strangely wise-beyond-his-years youngest. Their language takes its rhythms from these older fantasies as well, such that Peck feels the need to turn their overly formal dialect into a plot device by having Susan and Charles constantly bicker over who is being more affected, and to include a glossary that tries a bit too hard to replace mid-century Britishisms and genteelisms with up-to-date slang (for instance, defining "insolent" as "trash talk"). Peck would do better to trust his audience on this point; those who enjoy the kind of salty sea adventure he delivers here are unlikely to quibble with some highfalutin dialogue. His explanations about the mechanics of time and the dangers of its cessation do leave something to be desired, however, making this a comparatively lightweight yarn in the tradition it seeks to emulate. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois