Abigail aka Lynette
The opening lines of the novel inform the reader that Abigail Kirk was christened Lynette. It only takes two more paragraphs to delve into the world of metaphor that presents a portrait of the girl whom the reader will follow on a fabulous adventure:
So for the first ten years of her life she was Lynnie Kirk, and happy as a lark. A hot-headed rag of a child...
Hey, Judah
Judah Bow is the 18-year-old seaman of more than passing interest to Abigail/Lynette. One can tell that he is of interest by the choice of metaphor to which description of him is applied. Not just her, though; the entire house turns on Judah’s routine of setting off to sea and coming home again:
He blew into the house like a bracing nor’easterly, and everyone, from the mourning father to Gibbie...seemed to absorb vitality from his him He was unlike any body Abigail had known in her own world. He was just a well-knit, sturdy person of middle height, yet his muscles were of oak, his mind far-reaching.”
There’s One in Every Family
As Lindsey Graham is the opposite of Batman, so is youngest member of the Bow family, Gibbie, the opposite of Judah. Abigail will eventually learn that he is a bit more complicated than he at first seems which is good, because the first impressions do not go well:
No doubt of it, he was a miserable whitebait of a kid, as flimsy without as without…
Typical Teenager
Abigail’s personality itself is presented as something almost verging on unique, but today hardly seems more than ordinary. Perhaps because the novel was written in the late 1970’s, the descriptive passage below feels wildly outdated as what is intended to be a more singularly offbeat delineation of character. Or. maybe, the author simply hadn’t spent too much time around teenagers:
She carefully laid false trails until she herself sometimes could not find the way into her secret heart. Yet the older she grew the more she longed for someone to laugh at the false trails with, to share the secrets.
Vincent
In her own time, there is another youngest kid who is a big bother to Abigail. Vincent Crowne. Abigail doesn’t mind his sister, Natalie, but if Gibbie is the opposite of Judah, then Vincent is the opposite of human being. He is the kind of little gnat whose idea of a greeting upon one’s arrival is:
“You’ve got Dracula teeth…Big long white choppers.”
