With Adela's writing, you are immediately transported to the time of the depression and the Craine family's world. She paints a literary picture that is unforgettable. The laughs, the tears, the mischief, the heart ache. I'm hoping there's a sequel so I can find out how this family fared. ...more
The wonderful thing about hearing a story from a child's perspective is that children have limited awareness of adult troubles. In A Ship of Pearl, Eldie, 12, exists in a time when money is scarce, a house fire has taken his family's home and forced his siblings and parents to board separately with ...more
Told from the perspective of twelve-year-old Eldie, "A Ship of Pearl" is a heartwarming, insightful, and hopeful coming of age story. It's a story about memory; an artful demonstration of the magic of a child's perspective. We follow young Eldie as he adjusts to a new life after his family home is b ...more
This novel is one of the most hopeful and well written pieces I have read in a long time. Just like the central theme of the poem about the Chambered Nautilus, the novel unfolds one memory at a time, with each piece of the perspective creating the whole. As the teller o ...more
Adela Crandall Durkee is a storyteller and her novel A Ship of Pearl is a wonderful addition to my ever growing library of "Books I Want to Re-Read". A book that begs to be read again is one that stays on my bookshelf or, in this case, on my Kindle forever. No clearing it out because it is so well w ...more
I fell in love with Adela’s storytelling before I finished the first chapter. Ship of Pearl is so well written. I will probably read it again and again. My favorite time periods to read are the 1910’s through the 1940’s and this novel is set in the 1930’s. Life was anything but easy during that decad ...more