When I search for Uncharted: Story for a Shipwright on
Google, this is the first result that shows up:
Uncharted: Story for a Shipwright: J. B.
Chicoine: 978193685 www.amazon.com › ... › Genre Fiction
› Coming of Age
I’m not entirely certain how the algorithms work or how
Amazon categorizes novels, but “Coming of Age” really jumps out at me—I hadn’t
ever thought of Uncharted as a 'coming of age story', but on second thought, yes,
I suppose it is. Perhaps the term has more to do with how loosely it is
applied.
Wikipedia says “Coming of age is a young person's
transition from childhood to adulthood.” Aspects of Uncharted—specifically, Marlena’s personal accounts—deal directly
with her coming of age. But in a broader sense, (if one goes by Merriam
Webster—“to reach maturity”) then the definition also fits Samuel, for
although he is thirty one years old, he is finally coming to terms with his childhood
and now his adulthood—finally maturing as a person.
It seems to me (and this from a meager fifty-two years of
experience) that the ‘thirties’ is as much a time of transition and coming of
age as is adolescence. Yes, the changes of puberty and reaching physical
adulthood are momentous and highly visible, yet I don’t think it’s until one’s
thirties that a person begins to grasp who they are and how they came to be. I
don’t mean to get overly psychological here, but if the decade or so following
adolescence establishes patterns in our behavior and thoughts, congealing into
‘adulthood’, it seems that by our thirties we are confronted with what has
either been working for us or inhibiting who we’d like to be. And how did we
end up with this person we look at in the mirror? Are our traits genetic,
or did we learn them? Can we change the things we don’t like in ourselves? Or
are we doomed to struggle with seemingly inherent weaknesses for the rest of
our lives? Can we reconcile any of it and find peace with it all? Perhaps it was just me, but my thirties launched me into a great
deal of introspection.
It is this introspection that I write about in my novels.
I’m fascinated with the concept of ‘Coming of Age.’ Yes, I wrote about it in Uncharted without necessarily analyzing
is as such. Now that I’m deep into revising Spilled Coffee, I see that it is
the central theme approached from both the adolescent perspective of a fourteen-year-old
boy and from his thirty-one year old self as he reflects on his formative years.
Even as I write this piece for my blog, I wonder if
midlife could also be classified as another ‘Coming of Age’ episode. By now I
am an established adult in my own right, but there is nothing like being in
close proximity with aging parents (yes, cohabitating with them) to force
another full-blown self-analysis and growth spurt—but that’s a whole ‘nother topic!
