Wild Dark Shore

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of child death, illness, mental illness, death, and sexual harassment.

Rowan Jones acts as the primary protagonist and point-of-view character in Wild Dark Shore. She is a complex figure who struggles with her feelings of helplessness around the impacts of climate change. This leads her to hold people at arm’s length. Over the course of her time on Shearwater Island with the Salt family, she learns to open up to others and accept and show love, making her a dynamic character.

Rowan is haunted by two major tragedies in her past that impact her behavior: the death of her brother and the loss of her home. As an adult, Rowan built a home in the Outback in Australia that burned down in a brush fire. When she was 13 years old, while tasked with looking after her younger brother, River, on her family’s houseboat, River drowned. This led her to have a tense relationship with her mother, as each blamed the other for the accident. It also led Rowan to decide not to have children, as she explains to Dom: “I can’t have children that I may not be able to keep safe” (203).