Night Birds on Nantucket

The third of Joan Aiken's Willoughby Chase novels, Night Birds on Nantucket, follows Dido Twite, lost at sea towards the end of Black Hearts in Battersea as she sails all over the world before eventually getting caught up in a plot on the island of Nantucket.

The story opens with Dido Twite waking ten months after the whaler Sarah Casket plucked her out of the sea. After witnessing a whale hunt, Dido is taken aside by Captain Jabez Casket and charged with a secret mission: to coax his daughter out of the tiny cabin she has been hiding in since the death of her mother. Using a series of games and diversions, Dido manages to win the trust of the girl, who turns out to be burdened with the name Dutiful Penitence, and the pair become firm friends.

While Dido is below desks with Pen Casket, the Captain sights his nemesis — a great pink whale — and immediately gives chase. The pursuit of the whale draws the ship back to New Bedfort, where the Captain puts Pen and Dido ashore before resuming his hunt. After a brief stop over with Cousin Anne, the pair are sent to the Casket family home on Nantucket to be cared for by the formidable Aunt Tribulation, who with her cap and dark glasses initially looks more like the wolf from Red Riding Hood than anybody's aunt. While enduring life with Aunt Trib — Pen with quiet fear, Dido with insolence and rebellion — the girls bump into a strange ornithologist who has apparently built a giant iron telescope in order to study the island's nightbirds. But it soon becomes clear that the ornithologist and his friends aren't what they seem and their telescope might be something else entirely.

Clearly the opening sections of the book aboard the Sarah Casket are intended to parody Moby Dick. The gloomy Captain Casket, complete with Quakerish thee's and thou's, mourning the death of his wife and obsessed with the notion of finding the pink whale, is a lighter version of Ahab. The crew, both friendly and sinister, may be sketched lightly but they're familiar types who don't really need greater embellishment, and more time is spent on the details whale hunting and sailing.

The second part of the book owes more to a gothic thriller, with the two young girls stuck in a remote farmhouse with a sinister relative who doesn't seem to have their best interests at heart. In contrast to Pen, whose nervous disposition and reluctance to challenge authority makes her a solid gothic heroine, Dido is a girls-own adventure type and spends a lot of the book standing up to Aunt Trib and gradually working on Pen to do the same. It's one of Dido's most consistent and enjoyable traits across the novels she appears in that she never accepts things as they are, no matter how grim, but always looks about for a way to improve her lot and often, in the process, manages to rescue herself from her predicament.

A solid adventure novel that has a lot of fun subverting the tropes it has adopted — the ending manages to undermine both Melvillian and gothic expectations in an enjoyably satisfying way — and proves that girls are just as good at being action heroes as boys.