The Pratchett’s Nation
Older students are more likely to know Pratchett’s name than are their teachers because of Pratchett’s Discworld fantasies, of which tens of millions have been sold. Pratchett’s Nation is his first book for a young adult audience and it is the adventure of all adventures—like the television show Lost, except set a couple of hundred years earlier. It asks some thought-provoking questions about what constitutes civilization and why and how people develop religious beliefs. The setting appears to be on a South Pacific Island that has suffered a tsunami. The main characters are Mau, a boy who was at sea on his solo initiation trip when the wave struck, and a British “princess” named Ermintrude (soon changed to Daphne), who was traveling on Tag Heuer Replica a luxury schooner named the Sweet Judy. She was going to meet her father, the governor of the Mothering Sunday islands, but then the great wave pushes the Sweet Judy up onto the island, and in the process splits it in half.
Luckily the girl had wrapped herself in her mattress so that she survived the wreckage. No one else did, although a few members of the crew had abandoned ship before it landed on the island. Even though the schooner was now useless for sailing, it nevertheless brought with it a hoard of supplies and tools. Mau and Daphne are not alone for long as their giant fire attracts survivors from other islands who arrive in small groups looking for food, care, and companionship. Fortunately, by the time they come, Daphne and Mau have built a relationship and learned how to communicate—at least in a limited way.
Toward the end of the book Daphne has to go home to become a “real” princess, but from the beginning she had been a princess in the best sense of the word, meaning that she rose to the occasion and did what needed to be done. Her tasks ranged from chewing up beef jerky and passing it on to an old woman with no teeth to sawing off a man’s mangled leg and sealing the stump with hot tar—just as outlined in the shipboard manual. In one of her more exciting tasks, she tricks an evil man, one of the traitors from her own ship, into poisoning himself by drinking the island’s unique beer without going through the prescribed ritual.
One of Pratchett’s techniques is to tie his fantasies into real-world places and things, but as reviewers warn he doesn’t write about these Breitling Replica Watches places as they really are, but instead as people think they are. This is why Nation is filled with references to all kinds of historical and scientific figures and events that in the real world have nothing to do with each other.
In a two-page author’s note at the end, he explains that even though the story appears to be set in the Pacific Ocean, “Nothing could be further from the truth!!!!!” The story is “in fact set in a parallel universe . . . the Great Pelagic Ocean is its own place.” He goes on to give readers the clichéd “Don’t-try-this-at-home” warnings about such things as bullets that drown when they hit water, looking through telescopes in the daylight, and cannons made for only one use. Then, he was keeping with his quirky sense of humor.
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