Literary Devices in The Great Wide Sea
Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
Setting
Sure, it's majestic and all, but you've got to admit the sea is a little bit spooky. Like they wrote on old-timey maps of the sea: here be dragons.Sigh. A few dragons would probably be easier to de...
Narrator Point of View
You know the pearl of wisdom that says that you shouldn't judge anyone until you've walked a mile in their shoes?Welcome to Ben Byron's shoes. They're a pretty angry pair of kicks.Our narrator deal...
Genre
Q: What do you get when you put together a recently dead mother, an unstable father, and three brothers who'd do anything for one another? A: A family drama. In The Great Wide Sea, the Byron family...
Tone
Hey, we get it. A book about being lost at sea is gonna be melodramatic. Fair enough. Even so, there are moments in The Great Wide Sea that are super emotionally charged. Our favorite example is wh...
Writing Style
The Great Wide Sea has a wild and fast-moving plot. Hey: where there are shipwrecks, you'll usually find some serious action.One of the most action-packed sequences is (unsurprisingly) the storm th...
What's Up With the Title?
Nothing terribly cryptic going on here. The Great Wide Sea is about…the great wide sea. It literally takes place on the open water.It's probably worth noting that the title does appear in the tex...
What's Up With the Ending?
You know how sometimes the end of a book or the final episode of a TV show fast-forwards into the future so you know how everything turned out? Well, Herlong totally took a page out of the Mad Men/...
Tough-o-Meter
The Great Wide Sea is not, in itself, a difficult book. The plot is straightforward and the characters are, for the most part, easy to understand. But we're not gonna lie: the sailing jargon might...
Plot Analysis
The Bummer SummerBen Byron and his brothers, Dylan and Gerry, are having the worst summer in the history of summers. For starters, their mom recently died in a car accident. She's barely in the gro...
Trivia
Rockstar Herlong wrote her first novel in a college class. It hasn't been published…yet. (Source)
M. H. Herlong developed her website with the help of her son. (Source) Gerry's Blankie was based...
Steaminess Rating
Although this book takes place in the more-humid-than-a-sauna-in-August Caribbean tropics, it ain't steamy. The only woman Ben's father is interested in thinking about is his dead wife. And Ben's f...
Allusions
Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall" (2.2)Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night" (2.3)Thor Heyerdahl, Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft (3.19)Joshua Slocum, Sailing Alone Ar...