Eva Ibbotson Quotes

“The Cardinal was a beautiful ship, a snow-white liner with a slender, light blue funner. She had two state rooms, a dining room and lots of deck space where people could lie about and drink beef tea or play games.”

“This is a throughly enjoyable yarn, veering between farce and tragedy, and people with highly quixotic but believable characters. It revels in the joy and the danger of exploration...”

“The journey down the Amazon was one that Maia never forgot. In places the river was so wide that they sailed between distant lines of tree and Maia understood why it was called the river sea.”

Journey to the River Sea is the story of Maia whose parents are tragically killed abroad. ... Together with her new governess, Miss Minton, they travel to Brazil to start their new lives but are disappointed to find that their relatives, the Carters, do not want Maia but do want the allowance that comes with her.

“The tall, gaunt woman looked more like a rake or a nutcracker than a human being.”

“When I go I shall travel on a boat of the Booth Line and it will take four weeks to go across the Atlantic, and then when I get to Brazil I still have to travel a thousand miles along the river between trees that lean over the water, and there will be scarlet birds and sandbanks and creatures like big guinea pigs called capa.... cabybaras which you can tame.”

“Miss Bank and her sister Emily believed that girls should be taught as thoroughly and as carefully as boys. They had bought three houses in a quiet square, a pleasant place with plane trees and well-behaved pigeons, and put up a brass plate saying: The Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies - they had prospered.”

Journey to the River Sea is about orphaned London schoolgirl, Maia, who, accompanied by her strict but kind governess, is sent to live with her ghastly relatives in South America. Unlike her nature-phobic relatives, Maia loves her exotic, colourful new world.

“It looked that the Carters were pretending they were still in England.”

“Mr Murray now took over. They are willing to give you a home.′ Maia took a deep breath. A home. She had spent her holidays for the past two years in the school. Everyone was friendly and king but a home... ‘Not only that,’ said Miss Emily, ‘but it turns out that the Carters have twin daughters about your age.”