Nausicaa - Paperback

When Odysseus came out of the sea, everyone ran. She stayed.

Nausicaa is seventeen years old and the princess of the Phaeacians - the island people at the edge of the world, the great sailors, the people who receive what the sea brings. She has been shaped by her mother Arete, the most formidable person she knows, the queen who taught her to read situations and act on the reading rather than on the fear. She did not know yet that this was what she had learned until the morning Athena planted the thought of laundry in her head, and she drove the mule cart to the beach, and the man emerged from the bushes.

NAUSICAA: THE SHORE is the story of the encounter that the Odyssey passes through quickly on its way to Ithaca - told from inside it, from the perspective of the person who stayed on the beach and talked to the stranger and gave him the clothing and the food and the inside information about how to approach the palace, and who read the situation with the full quality of the practical intelligence she had been shaped to have.

She brought him to the palace. She watched him weep at the feast when the singer sang about Troy. She understood that he was always going home, that everything had been going home, that she was the last shore before the final shore. She found him before the ships left and asked him to tell his wife: the girl on the beach was not afraid.

He told her.

She went back to her life on Scheria - the ordinary life, made subtly different, because the encounter had shown her something about who she was. She was the kind of person who stays. She held the standard the conversation had established: the full presence to the specific person. She held it into the ordinary days.

The ordinary days were good.