A serious ethical argument dressed up as an adventure story

My review originally on Bookwyrm:

I was intrigued by the description of this novel written in the early decades of the 20th century, but only by listening to it did I really understand how subversive and unusual it was. It was as if the children of Lord of the Flies were cast in a story about a nineteenth-century pirate ship, but boys and girls both, so that the author could depict the fluidity of childhood morality not to scare us but to astound us with how different it can operate than the grown-up world of laws and responsibilities in society. The child the novel focuses on most keenly is ten-year-old Emily Thornton who witnesses many novel sights in her time away from civilization but makes of them a very different understanding when no Western moral structure is in place. You get a creepy feeling in the last quarter of the book when both she and the reader become aware of some of the life-threatening consequences of what she knows, and the author does a fine job of sticking to the trap he has constructed at the very end. But it is no grim slog, packed with merry antics on the part of the children to distract us from the desperate business of their captors/guardians on the pirate ship. If a child as young as the ones at the center of this book were to be read the story I think the serious implications would probably not sink in, but more sophisticated readers can learn what a clever thing the author has given us to make us wonder what we really believe about human nature within civilization.

I listened to the audiobook version narrated by Michael Maloney who knows just how to give the right inflection to a scene so that it goes down easily. Recommended.