The Girl Who Dreamed of Ships

This is a tale about a girl's dream and how she makes it come true through her own actions. She is brave, she is undoubtedly bolder than is good for her, and she achieves incredible rewards for the risks she takes. Her success is linked irrevocably to how she relates to the people who surround her—and without them none of it would have been possible. Samantha Jones is a girl with a passion for ships, and she has always dreamed of going to sea. Fed by stories her uncle told since she was a little child, her dream takes her into adventures little girls rarely get to experience. Against all odds, she braves repeated rejections until, by dint of her own ingenuity, boldness and wit, she wangles a job as cabin boy on The Lady Leeward, a clipper ship engaged in trade with the Far East. The book is not an account of day-to-day life aboard ship, of the command structure or even how the sailors perform their tasks. Rather, it touches mainly on events as they involve Samantha, such as her visits when the ship makes landfall and the people who make each stop memorable. It is clear from the start that Samantha might be in over her head, though she doesn't understand this point at the time. Each day of the voyage brings her up against something thought provoking, and puzzling them out is her main occupation. At times she stumbles, for instance, over how it feels to go against so many of her mother's prohibitions. At others, her attempts to figure out how to relate to her new found shipboard friends bear confusing fruit. Always and in everything she tries to do, her deception looms over her, threatening impending discovery and the end of her dream. The tale of her adventures is a multi-layered account of a young girl's transformation. Right at the beginning, she changes, almost before your eyes, from a mid-19th century girl into a rather tough-looking young sailor and manages to maintain this charade for an entire ocean voyage to China and back—well, almost all the way back, but that comes later. On the way, she struggles to deal with the guilt of leaving her family, even though she rationalizes that they will be better off without the extra mouth to feed. She also feels guilty for deceiving the people on the ship, since she lives the lie every day, and for her actions when she leaves her friend Michael wondering why she behaves as she does. In the process, she learns that there are consequences to be lived with from these decisions, and the lessons transform her from the child following rules laid down by others into a person of understanding who chooses responsibly for herself. Encountering the seamen aboard ship, entering new places and situations, meeting people with different cultures and languages—all these events change Sam Jones from a naive, unsophisticated city girl into an awakened, enlightened, world traveler. As important as it is, the physical transformation that turns a girl into a woman is almost lost to notice amid all the adventures she experiences. At the end of her adventures, Sam, her dream fulfilled, is happy to be Samantha Jones once again--and more than ready to meet whatever life brings her way. Samantha dreams, She'll always have dreams, And the ship will still fly with the wind.