Maata's Journal

Publishers Weekly

"Life was good to us in this land others call harsh," writes the Inuit teen of the title. This lovely tale set in the Arctic opens with Maata trapped on an ice-bound island. As she awaits rescue and cares for her mapping expedition colleague who is gravely ill, she records, in journal entries dated from April to July 1924, both her present-day struggle for survival and her childhood memories of the tundra. "We hunted for caribou and seal.... We made our clothes of the skins of the animals we killed. We were happy and we didn't know any differently." But then "strangers" arrive, representatives of the Canadian government, who relocate the Inuit to Foster's Bay. In this desolate settlement, they are soon ravaged by poverty and alcohol, and they yearn for freedom. An elderly woman, Siaja, teaches Maata rudimentary English and later predicts, "I think you will always move between the world of the Inuit and the world of the Qallunaat." As Maata comes to know death and tragedy, cruelty and racism, the words prove true, yet she remains hopeful. The heroine's inner strength and thirst for knowledge help her adapt to a future that includes being shipped to boarding school in far-off Quebec City after her parents' death. Sullivan seamlessly weaves his knowledge of Inuit customs into this graceful coming-of-age tale. His vivid description ("High in the star-swept gardens of the night, my mind would go back to Nunavut [Maata's home]") soars throughout his spare prose. The author creates a memorable character who is learning to navigate two cultures; her story possesses the haunting beauty of an arctic snowscape. Ages 12-up. (Feb.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Children's Literature

Maata grows up learning the ways of the white man as well as those of her native Inuit tribe. In her journal she writes about the present, interweaving the past, until the stories converge. Her brother never accepts the white man's way of life but Maata learns to read and write English and attends a boarding school when her parents die. She elects to go on an expedition with four men who are researching the geology, recording the weather, and mapping the coastline. The journal starts with her and one of the men waiting to be rescued. A fire burned the cabin where they were staying and killed one of the men. The other two left with the dogs and sled. As they wait for help, Maata writes about the Inuits with realistic descriptions of building homes and sleds, hunting, skinning the animals and using the skins for clothing, and family life. The story moves quickly and contains a lot of information. Readers will love Maata, her adventurous life, and her family, who are warm, loving, and full of laughter and optimism. 2003, Atheneum Books for Young Readers, Rose

VOYA

In a gentle, poetic but determined voice, a seventeen-year-old Inuit girl, Maata, records her survival in the hostile Arctic as well as in conflicting cultures. Her 1924 journal intertwines three compelling plots. Maata struggles to save a burned and scurvy-ridden fellow explorer while they wait for their ship. She reflects on two histories-her childhood as part of a nomadic tribe forced to live in a white man's settlement, and the conflicts and tragedies of a mapping expedition more focused on quantifying and controlling nature than listening to it. Inuits cooperate with nature's spirits, but Maata, whose most prized possessions are an amulet and a white man's dictionary, recognizes that spirits also live in words as she struggles against racial and sexual prejudice to use their power. The physical expedition parallels her intellectual and emotional challenges in which she and her fellow explorers lose family and friends. Although it contains no explicit sex or violence, the novel presents more mature issues than the Dear America series-a woman, once forced to be a whalers' "whore," teaches Maata English; Maata's companion contemplates suicide; an overzealous Christian missionary presumes God's protection against nature and causes the death of Maata's parents. This dark chronicle provides thought-provoking supplemental reading for world cultures study. Mature teen girls will identify with Maata's struggle within cultural expectations. VOYA CODES: 5Q 3P J S (Hard to imagine it being any better written; Will appeal with pushing; Junior High, defined as grades 7 to 9; Senior High, defined as grades 10 to 12). 2001, Simon & Schuster, 240p,
— Lucy Schall

School Library Journal

Gr 6 Up-A picture of Inuit life in northern Canada in the early 20th century. The novel, a 17-year-old girl's journal, puts Maata at a northern island research camp, along with Morgan, the last of the four men who embarked on the expedition, taking the teen to assist them and for her local knowledge. As Maata and seriously ill Morgan wait for summer breaks in the Arctic ice in the hope that a ship will rescue them, the young woman describes both the circumstances that brought them to this dire state and her people's forced evacuation by the Canadian government from their traditional hunting grounds to a small settlement. Unfortunately, Sullivan forces Maata to write in a pseudo-folkloric cadence of short, broken sentences: "They hunted here. They were born here and died here. And their bones lay in the earth. A sacred place. Land of the Inuit." A purportedly good student with a self-professed affinity and love for languages, Maata seems perfectly capable of writing and thinking in longer sentences, as she proves when she later writes about life in a boarding school in Quebec. But Sullivan is most irritating in his insistence that bright and articulate Maata has never learned the word for dictionary ("Mr. Webster's big word book," "my wintertime book") even though the whole English vocabulary of childbirth flows from her pen. What is so much more than a survival story is marred by stylistic choices. (And the jacket copy describes Maata's traditional life as "blissfully" nomadic, a strange adjective to describe nomadic life anywhere.)-Sue Sherif, Alaska State Library, Anchorage Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Maata, a young Inuit girl tells a powerfully moving tale set in diary form. She begins by recounting her wait for the ship that will come through the breaking spring ice to rescue Morgan, the last of the four white explorers on the island of Tumak in the Arctic in 1924. Her tale spins back to how her people, accustomed to living off the land, were rounded up by the Canadian government in Ottawa, and kept from their traditional nomadic life. Maata’s mother, seeing their future in the ways of the Qallunaat—the whites—encourages her daughter to learn English first from an elder and then from the schoolmaster. Maata is drunk on words, loves to use them to hold and capture what she thinks and how she feels. Her journal vividly reflects what she learns from her family and what she learns from the boarding school in Quebec, where she’s sent when her parents die in an accident caused by a well-meaning cleric. It also reflects how carefully she reads the ice and vegetation and wildlife around her. The story of the four explorers, one of whom dies in the fire that grievously injures Morgan, two of whom choose to try to go over the ice in winter and are lost, illuminates the tangled effects of culture, liquor, and class on Inuit/Qallunaat relations. Maata’s voice is redolent with a precise, natural lyricism. The only false note is the complete lack of any sexual tension between her late adolescent self and the men she serves as guide and companion. Teen readers, however, will eagerly devour her story, with its dramatic shifts in locale and its depiction of a very alien culture and time. (bibliography, author’s note) (Fiction. YA)