Coram Boy (Whitbread Children's Book of the Year Award (Awards)) - Hardcover

Gavin, Jamila

3.82

2,266 ratings by Goodreads

9780374315443: Coram Boy (Whitbread Children's Book of the Year Award (Awards))

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374315442 ISBN 13: 9780374315443

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001

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A powerful historical novel brings the dark side of eighteenth-century England to life as Meshak, the simpleminded son of Otis Gardiner, the Coram man, who makes money by getting rid of unwanted children and illegitimate offspring, decides to rescue an infant from the legions of tormented children and searches for the father of the baby.

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Review:

Eighteenth-century England is the setting for Jamilla Gavin's sweeping saga of growing-up, struggle, tradition and corruption. From an acorn of an idea about a real-life good Samaritan of yesteryear, the author has crafted a satisfying, if occasionally painful, novel that spans the lives of several fortunate and unfortunate young people of the day.

The author has researched her backdrop very well, and the atmospheric sights and sounds of the time are both vivid and captivating. Readers will smell the dirty streets and close-living of urban London, revel in the summer splendour of the finest country houses and then flinch when the harshness of life for the poorest souls is revealed in uncomfortable detail.

For in the late 1700s your circumstance of birth meant everything. Toby and Aaron may both find themselves living at Captain Thomas Coram's Hospital for parentless children, but their histories are as far apart as they could possibly be. Toby has been rescued from a life of slave labour in a faraway country; Aaron is the illegitimate son of the heir to a large country estate. They are watched over by Mish--a simple soul who has been with them since their arrival. His devotion to them is absolute, but his motives are not altogether straightforward. Could this curious man really be Meshak, the son of a wicked child-killer who was hanged at the gallows for his crimes?

Coram Boy is a glorious web of changing fortunes and subtle intrigues. There is tragedy and corruption, hope and evil. Sometimes brutal and sometimes unceasingly bleak, the genre of historical fiction has rarely been this good. It's undoubtedly the kind of book that wins awards. (Age 12 and over) --John McLay

About the Author:

Jamila Gavin lives in Gloucestershire, England. Coram Boy is her first novel to be published in the United States.

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