Escape to the River Sea
Rosa Sweetman is a young Jewish refugee, having come to England on the Kindertransport. Although she is happy at Westwood, a sprawling, dilapidated English country manor, she longs to find her family and to see more animals, about which she is extremely passionate. When she and her guardians have a dinner guest, Dr Yara Fielding, who is going to the Amazon ostensibly to search for a Giant Sloth, the search having been started many years earlier by her grandfather, she invites Rosa to accompany her.
Rosa accepts with alacrity. Do Yara and Rosa find the Giant Sloth, or do they find something sinister? This book is largely an homage to the beauty, danger and grandeur of the Amazon jungle. It is not until the last third of the book that the reader finds out the historical relevance, which is a stunning discovery but, for me, could have happened earlier. I would have liked more about the historical context of ratlines. They were secret routes used by the Nazis to evade justice, and this is the first time I have seen them mentioned in a middle-grade novel.
This book, inspired by Eva Ibbotson’s Journey to the River Sea, defies genre. It could be classified under History or Geography, and it may have difficulty finding its ideal reader.
