Orphan Island

“Nine on an island, orphans all,

Any more—

[…]

And the sky might fall.”

With no one to explain to them why they’ve been sent to the island or why the eldest must leave when the boat arrives, the children rely on folklore passed down through “generations” of other children who once lived there. This rhyme warns that something disastrous will happen if the kids break the rules, specifically the rule about when it’s one’s time to leave. Jinny questions whether the sky can really fall or if anything bad would happen. However, this rhyme foreshadows the hardships that really do occur when Jinny breaks the rule.

“The sleeping cabins sat on the curved sandy path that ran along the ridge above the dunes that fringed the beach. Each with a single window, like an unblinking eye, gazing out to sea.”

The simile comparing each cabin’s singular window to an eye highlights the individuality of each member of the group. Although the cabins all look the same, and the children all wear matching clothes, they each have different roles and contribute to the group or “family” in unique ways.

“Jak generally did whatever Oz did, ten seconds behind the other boy. They were two boats apart in age but otherwise nearly identical.”

This passage—and others in the book—indicates that some of the children bear such close physical resemblance to each other that they almost seem related. Although some or even all of them might be siblings, cousins, or more distant relatives, the novel never clarifies whether this is the case. Another possibility is that the children begin to resemble each other because they’re a close-knit community and literally depend on one another for survival.

“When a book died, there was nothing to be done about it. The kids could only bury it in the sandy earth beyond the book cabin door and try to remember the story. They marked these little graves with the biggest shells they could find. It made a funny sort of garden.

Jinny wondered, whenever she walked between the carefully placed shells, what books there had been before she came to the island. What stories were planted in the ground that had died before she got there. Books she’d never know, their pictures disintegrating into the earth, their characters gone forever. It was a funny thought, strange to imagine the bright stories in the dark ground, surrounded by scuttles and bugs.”

The graveyard of books symbolizes how the island’s connection to the outside world erodes over time. However, even once a book “dies,” the children keep its story somewhat kept alive by memorizing and retelling it. Similarly, after a child leaves the island, that child still remains “part” of it in the memories of the others.

“Beside her, Ess listened, mouth hanging slightly open, to the tale of a tree that gave everything it had to a boy—its apples and its branches, until the tree was nothing but a stump. It was a sad story, Jinny thought, but what a thing to do—to give up your whole self for someone else. To love someone that much. To be always and forever there, no matter what. To hold on like that.”

Jinny must essentially become the parent to a small child while still herself a child. Searching for models on how to do this, she turns to the tree in this book, which demonstrates self-sacrifice as a parental ideal. Jinny will try to follow this model, but it’s not enough because she ends up hurting Ess by trying to stay on the island forever instead of leaving when the next boat comes.

“‘Fuzzy needs to fly home to her family,’ said Nat gently […] ‘Nobody’s meant to go off alone, away from her family. Families stay together. This bee needs her family too.’

[…] Inside, Jinny felt a tiny burn, and it surprised her.

But the burn wasn’t just about Nat and Ess. In Jinny’s mind, there was a picture suddenly. Of a tiny green boat in the distance. Of a boy, shouting something she couldn’t hear. ‘Sometimes, people do go off alone,’ she muttered to herself as she kicked through the grass, carrying her bag of honey, which was now beginning to ooze. ‘Sometimes people do leave their families.’”

Nat’s words are wrought with irony because Ess was apparently taken away from her family just days earlier. All the children seem to have been sent away from their original families to come to the island and become part of this family of children—and then, as Jinny observes, they must leave this family too.

“They all knew it—that the sea was a danger, stronger than anything else. It fed them. It surrounded them. It kept them and defined their world. The island was only an island because the sea was there, all around. But the way the waves crashed against the cliffs and tossed spray into the air was not safe. Just the opposite. The sea was wild.”

Here, the narrative describes the sea, like change itself, as a double-edged sword. The children “need” the sea because it provides them with fish, but it could also kill them. This is similar to the change that occurs when the children must leave on the boat—it’s scary and potentially dangerous to leave, but they’ve learned that they must leave, or else things will be even worse.

“By the fiftieth notch, Ess had learned to swim well and to relight the fire with a flint. She had learned to wash her feet at night without being told, so Jinny no longer had to shake the sand from her blankets in the morning. Ess had also learned to speak in nearly full sentences. She had learned to make seaweed stew all by herself. And for the most part, Jinny had learned to believe that Ess could do these things. She didn’t worry so much.”

This passage illustrates how Jinny comes to “need” things from Ess just like Ess needs things from her. Jinny needs to know that Ess is okay, but she also craves attention from her and becomes envious of others with whom Ess develops friendships.

“Like all the other kids, she’d read everything she could get her hands on. The books were fun. The books were a welcome distraction. But the books were actually far more than that. The books were from the other place, the world out there. The books were about that world, and when the boat came for Jinny, she’d find out what was real in the books and what was make-believe.”

As Jinny notes, the books aren’t just for entertainment or even just for education. Rather, they symbolize the children’s (weak) connection to the outside world. The only clues they have about what it might be like come from the books or folklore, and even the books leave them with mysteries about what’s fictional versus real.

“Beneath the waves, she knew, the sea was a universe all its own. Full of hidden creatures, rocks, and even mountains. It was another world. Just thinking about the miles and miles of watery unknown sent a shiver down Jinny’s spine. There was fear in her shiver. But not only fear.

[…]

I’ll just go until I get tired, she thought, then I’ll turn around and come back. I just want to see what it’s like to swim far. I couldn’t do this with the others. But I can do this alone.”

Although the sea is dangerous, Jinny starts to view it as beautiful in all its mystery. Whereas before she wanted everyone to stay on the island forever, now she’s starting to understand Deen’s curiosity about what lies beyond the island.

“Ben continued. ‘You weren’t thinking about anyone but yourself, Jinny. You say you’re staying for Ess, but are you really? You’re staying because you want to, because you’re scared. You can’t just do whatever you feel like whenever you want. It’s not fair.’”

The phrase “You can’t just do whatever you feel like” emphasizes how Jinny continues to neglect others’ needs out of her own self-interest. With the variation of “it’s not fair,” Ben takes it a step further so that Jinny might better understand his message: It’s not wrong for her to be happy, but she needs to consider how her actions affect others too.

“I don’t understand why we’re here. I don’t understand what this is all for. Nobody explained anything, really. Did they? […] It sounded like this would be summer camp when you all told us about it. But it isn’t. It’s days and months and years, and the adventure is gone now, and it feels like forever. Can you remind me why we’re doing this? It’s hard not to feel lonely sometimes, and sad.

When you get this letter, will you please send the boat back for me? I’m going a little bit crazy.”

This passage from Abbie Ellis’s undelivered letter to her mother complicates Jinny’s understanding of Orphan Island, its inhabitants, and herself. The letter implies a bad scenario, but Jinny never learns what it is or how to end it.

“She suddenly had many more questions. Why hadn’t the letter gone home with Geoffrey, whoever he was? And why had Abigail—Abbie—if she had a mother alive, been sent to the island in the first place? Based on all the books Jinny had read, it wasn’t what mothers were supposed to do—send their kids away, abandon them to live on an island. What had Abigail done to deserve that?

[…] This was a new kind of feeling. A question bigger than a question. A mystery. A hunger, burning slowly.

[…] It looked sweet, with its flowers, but it wasn’t. This letter was powerful, dangerous.”

Although Abbie’s letter gives Jinny some clues about the truth, it raises more questions than it answers. She decides that the letter would only upset the others, so she “protects” them by keeping them in the dark.

“Jinny wasn’t sure what to draw. At last, she wrote her name, JINNY. It looked funny. She wasn’t used to seeing it written out like that. After another moment, she drew a looping line all around the word, a frame. But the brownish-black line on the white stone didn’t look like the vivid bursting sky at all. When Jinny tried to wipe it clean and start over, it only smudged, as the ink bled into the tiny cracks in the rock. That was no good. Jinny wanted to make something special, something worthy of the ink. She might never get another chance as this, ever.”

The rarity of ink on the island means that in the rare instances when they find some, the pressure is overwhelming, and Jinny can’t think of anything “worthy” of drawing. Her decision to write her name indicates that she doesn’t actually want to use the ink to draw; she wants to use it to write. However, this isn’t customary, so she doesn’t write much in front of the other kids.

“Dear reader who finds this, if I am gone,

My name is Jinny.

I lived here on this island.

I loved it.

I stayed.

I held on.

Jinny stopped writing again and stared down at the words, her words. They didn’t seem like very much. They didn’t seem to say anything at all, really. But they were the words she wanted to put down on the page. […] ‘It doesn’t matter what I write,’ she said to herself. ‘The thing is to have written something.’

When she was finished, Jinny looked back at what she’d made, tried to imagine what it would look like to the kid who found it. Her letters were nothing like Abbie’s loopy, pretty writing. They were shaky, and the inkfish ink was uneven, drying in scratches and clumps. But it was still a letter, a real letter. She’d written it.

[…]

Even if nobody ever found it, Jinny had left it behind.”

In the privacy of her own cabin, Jinny fulfills her secret desire to write a letter, which she has never done before (the only letter she has ever even seen was Abbie’s unsent one). Although the letter itself seems lackluster, just like most of the kids’ drawings on rocks, she’s still satisfied because she has created something that can stay behind on the island once she leaves. In effect, she has immortalized herself in the memories of the others on the island, like Abbie did by writing in all the books.

“The two of them had ducked beneath it that day, just like Ess and Sam. Sat beneath the table, safe there, and Deen had pulled the dune grass from around his ponytail and held it out.

‘For me?’ she’d asked.

And he’d nodded as he reached down and tied it around her wrist. A gift.

That had been the beginning, hadn’t it? Everything had been better after that. Everything Jinny could remember about anything had happened after that. How funny, to have forgotten something so important.

‘Oh,’ whispered Jinny as she thought of Ess and Sam, giggling together. ‘Oh!’ as if she’d stumbled onto something but only just barely recognized what it was.”

Here, Jinny starts to realize the somewhat painful truth that as children grow older, they learn to socialize with others closer to their own age and benefit from spending time with more than one person (their caregiver). She recognizes that after her own Elder left, Deen stepped in and became her best friend. However, she’s unable to fully make the connection and accept that Ess will survive and have friends even if Jinny leaves.

“Listening to his screams, Jinny found herself sneering at the boy. It was like she was curdling inside, filling with anger. Stewing in it. What was wrong with this kid? As annoying as Eevie could be, she would never hurt a defenseless animal. None of them would. How had Loo even thought to do such a thing? Where had that instinct come from?”

Jinny can’t believe that Loo is torturing starfish for fun, and it’s unclear why he’s doing this. At several points, the narrative implies that the children on the island have been sent there as punishment—if this is true, perhaps Loo’s behavior illustrates the sort of behavior it’s punishment for. However, Jinny also considers at times that Loo’s behavior is another consequence of her decision to disobey the rules and stay beyond her “time.” It’s impossible to tell because he arrived on the same day she decided to stay, and everything started changing shortly thereafter.

“Now she knew for certain. Her body had shown her. Deen had been right and Jinny had been wrong, and everything she did only made things worse.

If she left, if she climbed into the green boat now, was there any chance the mist might knit itself magically back together? Would the pictures return to the sunrise sky? Would she, Jinny, heal on the inside? Or would she just be running away if she left now, deserting the others, stranding them on an island she’d broken? That seemed very wrong. Escaping to that other place, wherever it was, and leaving everyone else behind in a fracturing world. She couldn’t do that. Most of all, she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving Ess to an island she’d broken. She’d thought she was holding on to her life, when really she’d been strangling it, gripping it so tightly it shattered.”

Through the island’s magical response to Jinny’s decision to leave, she learns an important truth about taking care of children. Even if the caretaker loves the child and tries very hard to help, sometimes one can do more harm than good (hence terms like “smother mother” and “helicopter parent”).

“Loo sat on the ground in the high grass, legs spread wide. In between them, the snake stretched up, vertical, as though it had sprouted there, grown as a seed from the earth and now impossibly tall. Its mouth was open in a tense yawn. Its teeth were needles. And it made a strange rattling sound Jinny had never heard before. Like a warning, or an end.

Loo was motionless. His face gone white. His eyes closed. Nobody moved. It was as though they’d all been painted into a picture. Drawn on a flat white stone. The moment lasted forever.

Or it took no time at all. A flicker, a second. It was hard to know. The snake stared, its tongue a thin, quick flame. Its taut silence had spread to all of them. Nobody spoke. Loo was a statue. Jinny wondered how long this could last. And what could she do? What should she not do?

Then Loo couldn’t take it anymore. He opened his eyes, stared into the snake’s mouth, and screamed at the top of his lungs, ‘YAAAAAAAAAH!’

The snake was a whipcrack. Its head jerked sharp, the teeth sank, Loo shrieked again and shook his leg violently, so that the snake flew off, like a rope tossed into the grass.”

Throughout the text, the children sometimes use made-up words like “inkfish” and “dried snaps” to describe things that they lack the language for. Here, they don’t know what a rattlesnake is because the island never had any before. However, the author compares the sound to a “rattle” to convey what kind of snake it is. Although Jinny correctly interprets the sound as a warning, she’s still “unable” to do anything until the snake bites Loo, after which she finally decides to intervene.

“She looked down at Loo, so close to what had to be death, and she knew it was her fault. Each shallow breath belonged to her. He was her burden, because she claimed him and then failed him.”

The main thing Jinny learns over the course of the novel is a sense of duty. She already knew how to love people and be loyal to them. What she lacked was the ability to see why she should care about the kids she doesn’t like as much (such as Eevie or Loo). In the end, she realizes that there’s more to it than just whether or not she likes someone. Because she claimed Loo as a second Care, she needs to do for him what she would have done for Ess.

“Loo groaned, almost inaudibly. He looked so small, so still. But even frail and dying this way, he made her angry. Underneath her guilt and fear, she was furious at him for coming to the island, changing everything. Even now, Jinny couldn’t love him the way she loved Ess. But that didn’t matter. It wasn’t the time for Ess anymore. This wasn’t about love, or what Jinny wanted. This was about what she owed Loo.”

At first, Jinny hated Loo just because he arrived in the boat, and not because of anything personal about him specifically (she hadn’t even met him yet). Later, she hates him because he’s loud, disobedient, messy, and exhausting and enjoys torturing animals. Although she doesn’t outgrow or overcome her anger, hatred, envy, or resentment, she does allow her sense of duty to Loo to trump these less important, more selfish feelings. He’s a toddler, and she’s the closest thing he has to a parent or guardian, so it’s her job to try to save him. Ess, her other Care, doesn’t currently need her help and will probably be fine with the others.

“Now the sky was falling, as if she needed more proof.”

Ironically, the folkloric rhyme—about the sky falling if more than nine people stayed on the island at once—returns. Although snow isn’t the entire “sky,” it does fall out of the sky and might look like the sky falling to someone who has never seen it or doesn’t know what it is. However, it’s unclear why previous tenants of the island wouldn't know what snow was if they had access to the same (and other) books.

“‘I don’t want to go either,’ said Jinny. ‘But…there are more important things than what we want. Sometimes it isn’t about us. Sometimes we aren’t the center of the story. This is about Loo, now. Please, let me go.’”

Snyder complicates the notion of a protagonist when Jinny, the main character, declares that she’s not the “center” of the story. This passage suggests that the individual has a greater responsibility to the group than to oneself.