Java Head

Salem, Massachusetts, at the turn of the century. Through the eyes of eleven-year-old Laurel Ammidon, we witness the last fragile summer of childhood shimmering before her. Her uncle's imminent return on the trading vessel Nautilus promises to shatter the quiet rhythms of the Ammidon household, a family of sea captains and merchant traders whose very identity is bound to the ocean's mysteries. Laurel's world is populated by anthropomorphized chairs that feel like friends, by the weight of her grandfather's maritime legacy, by the whispered anticipation of a man who has sailed to distant shores and will return transformed. As she teeters between the sanctuary of innocence and the inevitable pull toward adulthood, Hergesheimer captures something achingly true about those liminal moments when childhood begins to dissolve. This is a novel about what we lose when we grow up, and the sea, both the literal maritime world and the metaphorical unknown, becomes the great indifferent force against which one small girl measures her becoming.