Coram Boy (Contents S.) - Softcover

Gavin, Jamila

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0749732687 ISBN 13: 9780749732684

Publisher: Mammoth, 2000

Synopsis

Aaron grows up in the 18th-century Corum Foundling Hospital, having been saved from death by a boy called Meshak, who believes Aaron's mother to be an angel. Meshak, Aaron and Toby, the child of an African slave, all have a narrow escape as Meshak's evil father sets sail to sell them into slavery.

About this title

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 was born in India to teacher parents and by the age of eleven she had lived in an Indian palace in the Punjab, a flat in a bombed out street in Shepherd's Bush, a bungalow in Poona, near Mumbai and a terraced house in Ealing.

Coram Boy won the 2000 Whitbread Children's Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and has been adapted into a highly acclaimed stage play.  Her other novels include The Surya Trilogy, Danger By Moonlight and The Robber Baron's Daughter. 

 

 

Edition details

• Publisher: Mammoth
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0749732687
• ISBN 13: 9780749732684
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 323