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| Who can resist this jacket design by Edward Gorey? |
For the kiddie portion of my Tales of the Whales booklist, I read Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken. The story begins when ten-year old Dido Twite, an English girl, awakens from a ten-month coma aboard an American whaling ship. When Dido recovers, Captain Casket asks her to befriend his skittish daughter, Dutiful Penitence, who refuses to leave her cabin because she is afraid of the sea. Dido teaches the serious Quaker girl to have fun and play games. Eventually, Dutiful, or Pen, as Dido calls her, musters her courage and leaves the cabin.
Captain Casket is on a mission to find a pink whale he rescued from a beach in his boyhood. He is so obsessed with finding “Rosie” the whale that he leaves Pen and Dido at his Nantucket home with Aunt Tribulation. Aunt Trib is like the stepmother in Cinderella – she forces the girls to do chores all day and to wait on her like servants. Dido teaches Pen to stand up against Trib, and the girl develops some backbone.
Nightbirds is an “off-shoot” of Aiken’s Wolves of Willoughby Chase series, but the story won’t confuse readers who are unfamiliar with the earlier books. Readers will like Dido because she is brave and heroic and a tad full of herself. It’s great fun to see her give Aunt Tribulation what-for. Aunt Tribulation (who isn’t who you think she is) is deliciously bad. Nate the cabin boy is Dido's friend and ally. He owns a talking bird named Mr. Jenkins who offers plenty of laughs with his silly, aristocratic squawking. When Dido asks the bird where he’s been, he merely answers, “Your Grace’s wig needs a little more powder!”
From what I know about Aiken’s Wolves series, the books revolve around an alternate history, where King James II was never deposed. In her world, King James III rules, but he's constantly harassed by The Hanoverians. This conspiring is critical to Nightbirds on Nantucket. Dido, Nate, and Pen thwart an assassination attempt on King James III in the story’s climax.
