Journey to the River Sea

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I want to canoe up the winding waterways with Fin, underneath a dappled canopy of foliage teeming with exotic wildlife.

Her aunt and uncle have only taken her on for their own profit and the twins are spiteful girls whose dim witted cruelty makes Maia’s existence unbearable. I want to watch Clovis on stage at the Manaus Opera House, fan in hand against the stifling, muggy atmosphere. He later had a son, Finn Taverner, and lived in Manaus with plenty of friends, such as the Indians, Professor Glastonbury and many more people. The twins, who have received reward money for betraying Clovis’s hiding place to the investigators, refuse to share their wealth with their desperate parents or with each other and seek to hide it in the house.

I think that it is important to critique these classics and recognise potential harmful elements/content that has not "aged well". I was also certain that the author had little knowledge/experience of the cultures she was harmfully and incorrectly depicting. Like many of Ibbotson's protagonists, Maia is an orphan -- and more than anything else she longs for family and a sense of belonging. Journey to the River Sea is an adventure novel written by Eva Ibbotson, published by MacMillan in 2001.

I'm so glad that I did pick this up, as I sped through this book ridiculously quickly in one evening. I'm sure that Ibbotson was paying Burnett homage, because one of the subplots is an amusing twist on the "Little Lord Fauntleroy" story. Ibbotson wrote this book in honor of her husband (who had died just before she wrote it), a former naturalist. They had photographs of naked forest-dwellers in dug-out canoes or by their huts staring at the camera.

I raced through her adult historical fiction/romances (which are currently being re-released as YA) and enjoyed all of them, even though I was familiar her plot pattern by the third book. And they don't actually like Brazil so there is no exploring the region, just going into the garden is frowned upon.