Morning Girl takes place on a tropical island late in the fifteenth century, where Morning Girl can wake and "watch the ocean or slip into the mango grove," where there is the "rich scent of the large red flowers." It is an island rich with fruit and beautiful with birds and flowers, but it is not a paradise. There are "hungry bugs so small you don't know they're there until they bite you," and storms so violent the rain "was before me and behind me and all around me, a thick crashing wave, and all I knew was water and movement that slammed and hissed and screamed my name," storms that flatten the village.

The setting is realistic, and developed with small but vivid details that help the reader imagine what such an island and its people must have been like before Europeans arrived. We hear of "digging...