Miriam’s parents died in a car crash when she was almost 8 years old. Just as she settles into a new life with her aunt and uncle, they decide to leave to work at an orphanage in Kenya and Miriam has to move in with her Grandma. The night after her 12th birthday, she sees something that can’t be real – glowing writing on the attic door in her room. The message encourages her to open the door and behind it she finds a tropical island where some fairies tell her and some other orphans that they have been granted yearly wishes. She can listen to a message from her parents, make a wish and then come back each year to make another one. She will hear a final message from her parents if she comes back every year for six years. Her first wish is to have a lead part in the school musical so she can make friends. The magic only works for the wish if the child is also willing to work for the wish.Each year, Miriam wishes for something to help her. Along the way, she learns lessons about hard work, friendship, trust and loyalty. Her parents also get to make a wish for her each year, but she won’t know what they wished until she comes to the island for the final time. Sarah Anne Carter is a journalist by trade and has written numerous articles. She has also worked in the public relations and marketing fields. She grew up as an Air Force brat and has lived in many states and countries. Currently residing in Ohio, she spends her time enjoying her family, reading and writing. She is a lover of travel and cats.

On an island where one child is delivered each year while the eldest is taken away, nine children live under the leadership of new elder Jinny, who trains the latest newcomer and wonders what will happen when her own departure occurs.

"In 1855 a philanthropic young person, Miss Charlotte Smith, was escorting forty orphans to San Francisco when the ship was wrecked, and the survivors-Miss Smith, the orphans, a doctor, and some others, landed on a desert island. Those sailors who had escaped deserted them the next day in the boats. There they remained unvisited for some seventy years, with little to disturb the monotony beyond the adventures of the Doctor, who was secured in turn by Miss Smith and a shark. All this is contained in chapter one. The second chapter opens in 1922 at Cambridge, where lived the descendants of one of the sailors who deserted-a professor and his three children. A document and chart coming into the professor's hands, left by his dead grandfather, telling the story of the marooning of Miss Smith and the orphans, the professor and his family voyage out to the island and find there a thriving community, and Orphan Island is chiefly concerned with the community and the relations of it to the professor and his family."--Amazon.

On the island, everything is perfect. The sun rises in a sky filled with dancing shapes; the wind, water, and trees shelter and protect those who live there; when the nine children go to sleep in their cabins, it is with full stomachs and joy in thei

From the notable emergence of orphan figures in late eighteenth-century literature, through early- and middle-period Victorian fiction and, as this book argues, well into the fin de siècle, this potent literary type is remarkable for its consistent recurrence and its metamorphosis as a register of cultural conditions. The striking ubiquity of orphans in the literature of these periods encourages inquiry into their metaphoric implications and the manner in which they function as barometers of burgeoning social concerns. The overwhelming majority of criticism focusing on orphans centres particularly on the form as an early- to middle-century convention, primarily found in social and domestic works; in effect, the non-traditional, aberrant, at times Gothic orphan of the fin de siècle has been largely overlooked, if not denied outright. This oversight has given rise to the need for a study of this potent cultural figure as it pertains to preoccupations characteristic of more recent instances. This book examines the noticeable difference between orphans of genre fiction of the fin de siècle and their predecessors in works including first-wave Gothic and the majority of Victorian fiction, and the variance of their symbolic references and cultural implications.