Where the World Ends

Product Information

She has won the CILIP Carnegie Medal twice: first in 1988 with A Pack of Lies and again in 2018 with Where the World Ends. Join our community to get personalised book suggestions, extracts straight to your inbox, 10% off RRPs, and to change children’s lives. But for hundreds of years, people managed to subsist on what the land and the sea gave them, relying especially on the bird hunting of the sea stacks, such as Stac an Armin (Warrior Stac). When you compare this book to others with a similar abandonment/desert island survival situation (Lord of the Flies, The Last of Us, and The Explorer), the dynamics of the group in this book is especially incoherent and vague, with little real character development or meaningful relationships, and a lot of focus on the laughable religious control, which felt too contrived to be convincing. Similarly, there seemed to be a lot of holes and inconsistencies in the survival side of things, despite how great the setting and natural history detail was.

St Kilda is an isolated Scottish archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, situated 41 miles west of Benbecula. And yes, much of Where the World Ends I have found to be an interesting, descriptively brilliant (although for my own reading tastes not really all that pleasant and joyful reading experience), with the author, with Geraldine McCaughrean taking the bare bones of a real event from 18th century Scottish history, wrapping said event in imaginative detail and thoroughly real emotion, and creating a for the most part unforgettable and amazing tale of human survival against the odds. In the summer of 1727, a group of men and boys are put ashore on a remote sea stac to harvest birds for food. slips into the cracks of the human soul, dissecting with compassion the many paths that a person might take when confronted with such a challenge.Where the world ends is a brilliant historical novel set in 1727, based on a true story set in St Kilda. He looked inside his skull, like a cleit, and found it full to the brim with imaginations that might just sustain him through the bad times ahead.

They led desperately gruelling lives in a place so wild and inhospitable that trees refused to grow; surviving only on limited food crops such as barley and potatoes and on cheese made from sheep’s milk. This beautifully written book will, I know, be one to which I continue to refer (and no doubt reread) in the future.Her adult novels include Fires’ Astonishment (1990) and The Ideal Wife (1997), but she is best-known for her children’s books. After hearing a lot of buzz about this one and looking into the true story that inspired this book, I was really intrigued to read it. I particularly loved the fact that there was a guidebook about the birds at the end of the book, which I spent a great deal of time reading. I was never really sure of any of the ages of the children on the stac, except John whose rough age is mentioned once. Geraldine lives in Berkshire with her husband John and the lingering shades of all those characters she has invented in her books.

In the summer of 1727 a group of men and boys, there to harvest birds and eggs, were stranded on Warrior Stac, a pinnacle of rock that pitches out of the Atlantic, ‘as black and fearful as one horn of the Devil himself’. Pro: cover, illustration on chapter headings and page numbers, humor, friendship, teamwork, survival, family
Con: none
I rate it 5 stars! Cane, one of the men, sets himself up as a divine authority, praying for repentance, while Quill attempts to soothe the younger boys through story—and himself through memories of a young woman he loves. e. in relation to the characters’ mental deterioration) then it would’ve made for a more impactful story. Yes, it’s a mesmerising story of survival, but McCaughrean takes it in different and surprising ways too and, both terrifying and full of dark comedy, it becomes an elemental story of love and faith; of myth and imagination.

It's a shame that I feel that the true story that inspired this novel was more interesting than the novel itself, and just left me feeling disappointed, but that's the honest truth. The book’s story was loosely based on true events that showed how people can survive and be changed through the harshness and bitterness of having to survive on a mass of rock in the middle of the sea.