The boy they called Jacques leaned over the ship’s rail, squinting into the setting sun.
The phrasing of the book’s opening sentence is just odd and offbeat enough to naturally raise the suspicions of anyone not already familiar with the details of the story. Jacques is certainly not that unusual a name for a French boy, so the aroma of something being a little off must therefore lie in the “boy” part. And, indeed, this is the crux of the plot; the foundation upon which any necessity for telling this tale sits. For Jacques may well be a common enough name for a French boy, but this Jacques, he be not a boy at all.
“The only way I can explain is by telling you a story.”
Jacques, as it turns out, is a young woman actually named Esther. And Esther is Jewish. There really could not possibly be a worse combination at the time for anyone living under French dominion. The world as Europeans knew it was suddenly growing twice the size they imagined it to be and exploration of the already settled was too great a temptation for some. A temptation great enough to risk the worst possible consequences. In her attempt to disguise her way over the oceans to places not quite as ready to oppress the dreams of the most subjected, Esther finds herself in a situation not unlike Scheherazade faces in the tales of Arabian nights. In order to survive another day, she has just one single weapon at her disposal: a gift for fiction.
Once there was a green island in a blue sea: the greenest island, the bluest sea. At dawn the sun rose, a blaze of gold, over the horizon; at dusk white egrets stained themselves red as they flew through the sunset, dipping their beaks for the day’s last catch. Quick fish darted through the water, playing hide and seek; crabs wrote mysterious names in the sand; apes frolicked in the trees.
Much of the book is comprised of Esther’s narratives. She exploits her talent for storytelling on any occasion in which might be useful. Her rhapsodic delivery of adventurous tales is enough to spellbind most listeners who often drop allow their guard to be lowered in the face of such delight. To the reader this may seem unlikely, but those readers should ask themselves why they continue to read her stories themselves. Everybody listens to stories, reads them, or watches them play out on screens must have something to gain by the act otherwise with all the other options available for spending time at their disposal, why bother? The question here is really not what Esther gains by telling stories—this much is obvious—but what her audience gains by continuing to listen to them.
