The Snake-Stone

by Berlie Doherty

Overview

James is adopted. He knows that to work out his future he has to make sense of his past. He embarks on a journey to find his birth-mother who tells her own story in this moving and powerful novel.

James’s adoptive parents are proud of his talent and determination. He’s in training for the Junior National Diving Competition. But when he discovers the snake-stone in a box with his other ‘belongings’ from his time as an abandoned baby, he determines to set out on a quest to find his birth mother. He must make sense of his past if he is to work out his future. James travels to the Derbyshire Peak District to begin his search. Events leading up to James conception and birth are told in his birth-mother’s own voice, in flashbacks, and the most moving, poignant and powerful story is told.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780006740223
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/06/1997
Series:	Collins Tracks S
Edition description:	Revised ed.
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.60(d)
Lexile:	710L (what's this?)
Age Range:	12 - 17 Years

About the Author

Born in Knotty Ash, Liverpool, Berlie Doherty is the youngest of three children. She has been a social worker, a journalist, a teacher, and, for the past twenty years, a writer.

Berlie has twice won the prestigious Carnegie Medal, for ‘Grannie was a Buffer Girl’ in 1987 and for ‘Dear Nobody’ in 1992. She lives in the Derbyshire Peak District.

Editorial Reviews

‘This story could not be bettered and can only be put down with a struggle before its unforgettable climax’
Independent

From the Publisher

A teenager adopted as a foundling baby suddenly feels a need to track down his birth mother in this poignant and well-crafted story.

Despite loving adoptive parents, an eager talent for high diving, and a training schedule that takes up every spare minute, James is beset by a restless, rootless feeling. Armed with only a fossil stone and the scrap of an address, he breaks training and secretly sets out for the Derby back country, following a 15-year-old trail. Juggling an array of characters and subplots in ways that enrich rather than crowd the story, Doherty (Dear Nobody, 1994, etc.) lays out not one journey, but two: Elizabeth, a child laden with guilt and remorse for loving a "wild boy," gives birth alone in a hen shed, and treks over the rugged tor on a blustery day to leave her child, and her precious stone, at a strangers door; gathering clues as he goes, James eventually retraces her mountain journey, in reverse. The meeting of mother and son is brief—Elizabeth, now with husband and children, asks a single quiet question—but almost unbearably intense and, at least for James, cathartic; he returns to his familiar life with a new sense of completeness. Although of the two protagonists, Elizabeth has far less presence in the narrative, she is the more vivid character, and her heartrending, heroic trek gives this story most of its emotional impact; still, the space between diving platform and water is not the only place David exhibits native grace and courage.

Kirkus Reviews