The Island at the End of Everything by Kiran Millwood Hargrave (review)

In 1906, Culion Island in the Philippines is home to victims of leprosy and their families; Amihan's mother is one of the Touched, as they are known, but Amihan herself, at twelve, shows no signs of the disease. Enter Mr. Zamora, a nasty government official, who removes Untouched children from the island and separates them from their parents in an effort to eradicate the disease. Ami makes a friend on the new island, Mari, and they eventually escape the island and return home in time for Ami to say goodbye to her dying mother. While Hargrave's intent was obviously to give a human face to this episode in history, she neglects to fill in the details that middle-grade readers would most want and need to understand the context, such as how the disease is actually spread. She casts Zamora as a paper-cut-out villain, a lepidopterist with compulsive habits who doesn't understand the disease he's fighting, hates children, and relishes the process of killing the specimens he hatches from cocoons. The lexical connection between lepidoptery and leprosy bears a heavy symbolic load for the story in Ami's mother's love of butterflies, in an accident resulting from Mr. Zamora's hobby that does in fact bring massive numbers of butterflies to the island, and finally, with Ami's future vocation, revealed in an epilogue that takes place thirty years later. What to make of all the threads is left to readers, who will certainly have more questions given the vague author's note but may be inspired to seek out their own answers or, for a more satisfying dramatic treatment of the issues, turn to Wolk's Beyond the Bright Sea (BCCB 6/17). KC