From Publishers Weekly
Of this "mesmerizing" tale of eight shipwrecked British schoolgirls, their governess and her eponymous lover, a sailor, PW observed, "Wiggins strips away the veneer of civilization to reveal the raw, primitive heart of nature and human nature." Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal
YA-- Described by the author as a "female Lord of the Flies ," this book is every bit as chilling and brutal as Golding's. It is around 1919 and Charlotte, a young widow, takes on the job of tutoring the daughters of British subjects in Burma. She enters into a passionate affair with John Dollar, captain of a small ship. Soon a foreshadowing of the savagery to come occurs on an apparently genteel picnic when the migration of sea turtles to lay their eggs on the beach becomes a blood bath. In very quick order a tidal wave strikes, the young girls are left to survive on their own with a paralyzed John Dollar, and a group with no code of behavior or morals drifts into shocking cannibalism. The last 20 pages of the book are spine tingling. Wiggins (wife of Salman Rushdie) has given her readers an uncomfortably clear picture of a society in which great gentility and dark human conduct coexist. It is both thought-provoking and horrifying. Its dark, disturbing message about life on a primitive, lawless basis is neither easy to acknowledge nor easy to dismiss.- Barbara Weathers, Duchesne Academy, HoustonCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Just after World War I, Charlotte Lewes, a 25-year-old schoolteacher raised on Kipling, is sent to Rangoon to instill British values in the children of English colonists. During a festive sailing expedition, a tidal wave strands her and seaman John Dollar on an island with eight schoolgirls, who almost immediately turn into cannibalistic savages. Wiggins's novel is basically a feminist reworking of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, and it presents some of the same problems. As in all allegory, characterization takes a back seat to theme, and psychological motivation is largely ignored. Charlotte, ostensibly the main character, is missing throughout most of the second half of the book, and the children, who hold center stage in her absence, are so poorly delineated that it is difficult to tell them apart. John Dollar succeeds as a simple adventure yarn, but as a novel of ideas it is less than convincing. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Prudence Hockley
John Dollar is a devastating, strangely beautiful novel that renders appalling events in exquisite prose. The book begins by tracing the fortunes of Charlotte Lewes, a grieving World War I widow whose life in England is passionless and empty. She comes to Rangoon, Burma to teach, and there recovers her sensual nature and experiences a reawakening of love with the sailor John Dollar. In Rangoon, she is barely tolerated by the "mannered, pre-emptive, supercilious" English community who build their lives around the creation of an England which to them is "myth and memory, a place more real in microcosm, in its recreation, than in any actuality." The focus then shifts to a patriotic sailing expedition to the Andaman Islands, which ends in disaster: Charlotte's eight female pupils are cast ashore with John Dollar, who is paralyzed in the accident. The girls attempt to survive and keep hope alive by establishing familiar hierarchies and rituals from their own colonialist and Christian culture; yet it these structures and beliefs that make possible an increasingly horrifying chain of events. A riveting novel, John Dollar illuminates the racism, viciousness, and arrogance inherent in colonialism, and the potential for the misuse of power which exists within both imperialism and organized religion. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14.

Review
Los Angeles Times Book Review Marianne Wiggins' power is disjunctive, disruptive; she pounds the atoms of discourse until they split and go radioactive....Wiggins writes with a feverish brilliance...close to prophetic brilliance.

Book Description
Charlotte Lewes, a young Briton newly widowed by the Great War, departs for colonial Burma in 1917 to escape the ruins of her life. As a schoolteacher in Rangoon she is rejuvenated by the sensuous Oriental climate, and meets John Dollar, a sailor who becomes her passionate love and whose ill-fated destiny inextricably binds her to him. On a festive seafaring expedition, the tightly knit British community confronts disaster in the shape of an earthquake and ensuing tidal wave. Swept overboard, Charlotte, John Dollar, and eight young girls who are Charlotte's pupils awake on a remote island beach. As they struggle to stay alive, their dependence on John overwhelms him, and an atmosphere of menace and doom builds, culminating in shocking and riveting scenes of both death and survival.

From the Publisher
A national bestseller, "a superb novel, hypnotic, disturbing and artful . . . so good that most readers will want to devour it in one gulp."--Washington Post Book World "Richly imaginative . . . pure adventure."--San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle

About the Author
Marianne Wiggins is an American living in London. She has won a Whiting Award, an NEA award, and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize. Her novel Almost Heaven is also available from Washington Square Press.

ANNOTATION

"Richly imaginative...pure adventure."--San Francisco Chronicle

FROM THE PUBLISHER