Wide as the Wind is the first novel for young adults to deal with the stunning, tragic story of Easter Island. This work could be described as quest fiction for all ages in the general line of Tolkien's The Hobbit, but it is set in the real world, not Middle-earth. Wide as the Wind tells a story of love, war, environmental collapse and the Polynesian voyages across the Pacific Ocean: the greatest adventure in human prehistory, which has been compared in its boldness to modern space voyages. Wide as the Wind has received four international prizes for fiction and environmental literature.
He came to a clearing where rays of sun slanted through the mist. Miru raised his eyes and beheld a vast, arching tree, wider than a whale and taller than a hill, whose crown was circled in clouds. Every branch, twig and leaf sparkled with rain. The tree looked like a giant waking from sleep, stretching its arms where birds darted in and out of the foliage, banking, diving and trilling songs. That whole creature thrummed with life.
Miru told the people, “The time has come to rescue our island and ourselves. Every valley, every mountain, every tree and flower, each wave and inlet, each bird, each fish, everything that is alive must be cherished and protected."
Winner, 2017 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Young Adult Fiction
Winner, 2017 silver Moonbeam Award for Young
Adult Fiction
Winner, 2018 silver Feathered Quill Award for Teen Fiction
2018 Purple Dragongly Certificate of Excellence for Environmental Literature
If we could not walk, we hitched rides in cars, jeeps, pickups, cattle trucks and trailer trucks, or we rode gaudy-colored buses with names like “La Estrella del Norte” and “La Flecha del Sur,” their dashboards and windshields adorned with Virgins, saints and crucifixes, their seats full of women, men, children and beasts, while young boys hung out of the doors, their shirt sleeves and trousers flapping in the breeze. We traveled from the Texas border south between the ranges of the Sierra Madre into the fertile valley of Anáhuac, passing under the shadow of snow-topped volcanoes, Ixtaccihuatl and Popocatepetl, with sloping fields on their flanks, forests higher up, their peaks shrouded in smoke, fog or thunderheads. Then we cut west to the beaches of the Pacific, Mazatlán and Acapulco, or sometimes east to the Gulf of Mexico, making our way through Oaxaca and Chiapas, the jungles of Mayan country in Tabasco, Campeche and Yucatán, finally returning to where we had started by different routes, insatiable for new landscapes, towns, cities, peoples. If you are seventeen, at large in Mexico, seeing new things and learning every hour, any cheap dive, any impulse or encounter is pure as the snows on Popocatepetl, stained by hot ashes.
Wide as the Wind photo from: Easter Island Traveling