Crossing the Water: Eighteen Months on an Island Working With Troubled Boys -- A Teacher's Memoir [Hardcover]

Daniel Robb (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 2001

Off the coast of Cape Cod lies a small windswept island called Penikese. Alone on the island is a school for juvenile delinquents, the Penikese Island School, where Daniel Robb lived and worked as a teacher, not far from the mainland town where he grew up. By turns harsh, desolate, and starkly beautiful, the island offers its temporary residents respite from lives filled with abuse, violence, and chaos. But as Robb discovers, peace, solitude, and a structured lifestyle can go only so far toward healing the anger and hurt he finds not only in his students but within himself -- feelings left over from the broken home of his childhood. Lyrical and heartfelt, "Crossing the Water" is the memoir of his first eighteen months on Penikese, and a poignant meditation on the many ways that young men can become lost.

Ranging in age from fourteen to seventeen and numbering up to eight at a time, Robb's students at Penikese have been convicted of crimes including arson, assault, and armed robbery. They are tough, troubled kids who are sentenced to the school by courts in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. During their time at Penikese, they live in a house together with the staff of four and share the responsibilities of living on the island -- chopping wood, cooking meals, maintaining and repairing the buildings, caring for the farm animals, and doing other chores. For many of the students, it's the first time they've experienced such a combination of discipline and freedom, or the kind of trust extended to them by the staff. And despite their resistance and sometime wildness, Robb soon finds that they have the capacity not only to confound but to surprise him, both with their insight and theirvulnerability. In "Crossing the Water," he renders the boys' voices and his life with them -- the confrontations, the rare epiphanies, the flashes of humor -- with great vividness.

Passionate, poetic, and deeply felt, "Crossing the Water" is a powerful and moving book, and the debut of a tremendously gifted young writer.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's a rare pleasure when a new author shows not only notable talent, but the skill and chutzpah to go where no one else has gone before. Daniel Robb takes a subject that many have considered but few understood--juvenile delinquents--and writes about it with rare insight. For a year and a half, Robb was a teacher on Penikese Island, off Cape Cod, where teenage boys are sent by the courts and social services to put six months between themselves and their chaotic daily lives. During this time they experience safety, a routine, hard work, and the decency and constancy of adults better adjusted than the ones they've known. The place is less a school, Robb writes, than "a family, or a way of life, a rhythm, a discipline, a music, with many voices of boys competing with my own for ownership of the tale." The boys have varied résumés: Mose shot a man who threatened him one night; Edward torched a boat for money; Alan is the king of substance abuse; Burt's parents have both been in jail since he was 7. But Robb finds that they all have a number of things in common--childhoods fraught with so many uncertainties that they never learned cause and effect, the lack of a father's guidance--the same things, it turn out, that plague Robb's own heart.

Robb has a gift for evoking their natural surroundings on the island in a language that resembles poetry while capturing the cadences and tribulations of his surly yet charming students with perfect pitch and clear-eyed sympathy. Not only does the dichotomy make for compelling reading, it works on the kids as well: Ned, the longhaired metalhead, gives CPR to a mouse and actually revives it; Wyatt, who stole cars out of boredom, considers his absent father's legacy after reading a Gary Snyder poem. Robb is a literary voyager in the most unlikely of places, and, in the end, reveals that even boys such as these have a poetry all their own. --Lesley Reed

From Publishers Weekly

Disturbing, funny and often wise, this memoir charts Robb's 18 months as a resident teacher working with troubled youth at a small progressive school on a remote, picturesque island near the Massachusetts coast. At first Robb, a writer and editor, approaches his position at the Penikese Island School as just another job, but soon his interaction with the small group of teenage boys becomes as challenging and rewarding as that of a family, transforming everyone in the process. The school administrator and Robb's fellow teachers, unswayed by the legal transgressions of the juvenile offenders, see only young boys who can be redeemed with adult supervision, hard work, clean air, healthy food, scheduled activity and fun. Robb, with a keen ear for dialogue and an instinct for telling detail, captures the humanity of each boy, thus avoiding Blackboard Jungle clichs, so the reader sees through the tough facade of the car thief, arsonist or headbanger to the insecure, lonely kid underneath. In the end, Robb must confront his own demons born of a turbulent childhood and youth, while enduring the loneliness of the solitary island existence; he handles this introspection in a series of well-placed flashbacks and memories. This brief experience at Penikese alters him profoundly, giving him stability, confidence, love and family. Yet he never lapses into sentimentality about his job, the boys or himself. Agent, Jill Kneerim. (June 13)Forecast: This beautifully written, compassionate book should appeal to a wide readership. If it gets the review attention it deserves, sales should be respectable.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743202384
• ISBN-13: 978-0743202381
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,596,901 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #94 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Crime & Criminals  > Offenders

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hats off to Dan Robb, June 28, 2001

By 

Richard T. Lathrop (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossing the Water: Eighteen Months on an Island Working With Troubled Boys -- A Teacher's Memoir (Hardcover)

There is a small Island in Buzzard's Bay that isn't a vacation resort. It was once a leper colony and is now a kind of prison.

Dan Robb, a version of today's Renaissance Man, crosses the water to teach at Penikese Island School, a community for delinquent boys.

Robb avoids the temptation to offer a romanticized or idealized account of this work. He describes it in excerpts from his journal-passages that include his inner thoughts along with the actual exchanges he has with his students. He does offer his analysis and evaluation of the effort to assist these young outcasts-we learn what the experience has to offer them and view a range of responses from the individuals he encounters at the school.

Robb weaves his own developmental struggles (growing up in a single-parent home) and his academic interests (a writer and student of English Literature) into his work and he shows us how such inward-looking reflection informs him about the destructive impulses which weigh so heavily on the boys at Penikese. He concludes on a strong, positive note.

The book is a job well done, interesting, instructive and thoughtful. Thanks, Mr. Robb, for writing it.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating!, May 30, 2001

By 

Laura Stout (North Dartmouth, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossing the Water: Eighteen Months on an Island Working With Troubled Boys -- A Teacher's Memoir (Hardcover)

I read this book in one delicious gulp! I, literally, could not put it down. I was fascinated by these boys, pushed to the fringes of society, accountable to everyone and embraced by no one. Robb does an excellent job of explaining the frustration of working with these "problem children." All the sacrifices, rewards and disappointments of being an unasked-for mentor are here in vivid color. The often times sad tales of these boys are skillfully woven through with narratives from the author's own life, his struggles to come to terms with his own childhood, and his own fumbling attempts at "parenting." Robb asks the difficult question: How can a young person follow the path to responsible, nurturing adulthood if they have no footsteps in which to follow? It's a hard question...and the answer harder still.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars BACK TO BASICS IN THE AGE OF E-MAIL, July 23, 2001

By 

Peter Newton (Atlanta, GA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crossing the Water: Eighteen Months on an Island Working With Troubled Boys -- A Teacher's Memoir (Hardcover)

It's a provocative book that has jump-started several great conversation with friends. I learned from Dan Robb's book, CROSSING THE WATER, the cost of trying to connect with another human being. And the risks involved. I admired the simple honesty of his well-told story. Here is a man trying to make a difference in the world--one face-to-face interaction at a time. An admirable task in the age of e-mail. In teaching the boys of Penikese the basic rule in life that every action has a consequence he has reminded me of the importance of compassion. Robb writes intelligently, with a common sense almost spiritual bent I found compelling. I think he offers something to strive for, not just to troubled boys. Among other topics CROSSING THE WATER is a commentary of adolescent education, the art of teaching, street life, island life, parenthood, race realtions, and what it takes to be a human being these days. Robb's got a lot to say and I want to hear more from this new writer and true teacher.