The Great Wide Sea Themes

At first glance, it's easy to mistake The Great Wide Sea for a classic story in the tradition of man vs. nature. After all, Jim Byron gets stranded in the sea, and then a storm hits, depositing his...

Family. You can't live with 'em. You can't live without 'em. And you certainly can't get along with them every second of every day.The Great Wide Sea is a novel in which family ties support and sus...

In a book that involves a missing father, a shipwreck, a shark attack, and one character falling off a cliff, it makes sense that fear is a recurring theme. But what's interesting about fear in The...

The Great Wide Sea is about three kids who are displaced from their home again and again. First, solid ground is ripped out from beneath the Byron brothers' feet when their father sells the family...

Death. Floating alone in the sea. Being stranded on a deserted island. Even a quick outline of events in The Great Wide Sea shows how isolation and loneliness are themes that just keep coming up. B...

Though the focus of The Great Wide Sea is on Ben, our protagonist, each of the Byron brothers matures over the course of the novel. Gerry learns to swim, which is a huge step for him. (He also catc...

After Ben's mom dies, his life is totally upended. That feeling gets way worse when his dad pulls him away from everything he knows to spend an entire year at sea. His journey throughout The Great...

Depending on how you look at it, the Byron family is either very unlucky…or the complete opposite. On one hand, The Great Wide Sea begins with the death of Christine, and at least everyone else i...