The New York Times Book Review - Alida Becker
One of the many pleasures of Marina Endicott's exhilarating new novel, The Voyage of the Morning Light, is its celebration of life on the open sea. From the very first pages, when the barque Morning Light sets sail from Nova Scotia in 1911, Endicott's heroine knows she's in a new world.
Madeline Thien
"An immersive reading experience, the kind that makes one think, and think again...How movingly the novel considers the otherness between people, between the world and us, between human and all other life. Its boldness has a deep humility. Marina Endicott allows her characters to exist without being afraid of their (and our) moral dilemmas and failures, or the gap between our intentions and our understanding. She writes about goodness so well—so beautifully and joyfully. I feel as if I could close my eyes and still be at sea with these characters. A wonderful, brilliant book."
Mary Norris
"Marina Endicott has given us a rich and wonderful read, with ships and whales and a tincture of Greek, centering on an observant young troublemaker of a heroine, who navigates a sea of memorable characters, each of them drawn with Dickensian skill. An adventure story that comes full circle emotionally, The Voyage of the Morning Light will find a place among the beloved seagoing classics."
Helen Oyeyemi
"A beautiful book. It’s so lovely in its graveness, and in its comedy…The cut of the prose is so keen and the happenings are so finely wrought that it contorts where it can't help but contort, around the places where unanswerable grief comes into our lives."
Globe and Mail - Sarah Laing
"[The Voyage of the Morning Light] is one of those very, very rare books: It breaks your heart (over and over), is heavy with sorrow and has no neat endings or answers—and yet, it also opens you up to wonder, making you yearn to know more, see more and love more."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-03-29
Two sisters sail around the world.
It’s 1911, and after her much older half sister marries a ship’s captain, teenage Kay joins them onboard the Morning Light for a trip around the world. Their strict father has recently died, and as they travel, the sisters find themselves still haunted by his legacy: He’d run a school for Native American children in remote Canada, where scores of students apparently died from tuberculosis. Now Kay suffers from nightmares so severe she wakes up screaming. But as the trip continues, both Kay and her sister, Thea, begin to have a look around them. Kay begins studying ancient Greek with a goofy English pastor who’s joined them. Things change when Thea, who longs for a child, adopts a young boy from a poor Micronesian island. Kay is troubled by the adoption, though she can’t immediately articulate why. Endicott depicts her characters with great delicacy and sympathy. Kay, especially, is a wonder to behold: She’s barely a teenager when the novel begins, and to witness her first encounters with the world, as she quietly unravels her own feelings and beliefs about what she sees, is simply marvelous. The novel’s second half shifts in time and mood in a way that feels both surprising and exactly right. There is so much in this book to linger over, from Kay and Thea’s relationship with each other to the strength and autonomy of Kay’s mind to Endicott’s lyrical descriptions of the sea and the ship. It’s a novel to return to again and again.
Endicott’s latest novel is a quiet, elegant triumph with no easy answers.
