Gay's year on Sunset Island by Marguerite Aspinwall
"Gay's year on Sunset Island" by Marguerite Aspinwall is a juvenile adventure novel written in the early 20th century. It follows fifteen-year-old Gay Annersley and her close-knit adoptive family as they decamp to a Caribbean island owned by her sea-captain uncle, hoping the climate will restore her ailing uncle’s health. Amid house-restoration, island exploration, and family teamwork, they stumble on clues to a legendary pirate hoard linked to Sir Henry Morgan. The
story blends coming-of-age, survival, and treasure-hunt mystery with a strong emphasis on character, courage, and resourcefulness. The opening of the novel finds Gay narrating life in a New England household upended by financial ruin and her Uncle Charles’s breakdown until Uncle Joe arrives with a bold plan: sail south on his schooner, the Myra, to his newly acquired Sunset Island. After a calm voyage, they anchor in a lagoon, reach a long-abandoned planter’s house, and begin repairs; the Myra departs, due to return in two months. A hurricane passes, and wreckage bearing the Myra’s name drifts near the reef, a discovery Gay and Syd quietly fear may mean the ship is lost. The family organizes into indoor and outdoor “teams,” clears paths, plants gardens, and, while sorting an old chest, finds Rosemary Carreau’s 1804 diary describing a copied map to Morgan’s treasure—though the map itself is missing. They set out to circumnavigate the island, camp on the beaches, and take impromptu lessons in stars and shells before Reddy tumbles into a hidden cave complex that could be an ideal pirate cache. They camp in the caves, trade tales of buccaneers, and as night falls Gay wakes to a mysterious sound, leaving the early chapters poised between domestic enterprise and looming adventure. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
Read or download for free
Not sure how to start? Reading Guide
| Reading Options | Url | Size | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read now! | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76532.html.images | 333 kB | |||
| EPUB3 (E-readers incl. Send-to-Kindle) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76532.epub3.images | 587 kB | |||
| EPUB (older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76532.epub.images | 584 kB | |||
| EPUB (no images, older E-readers) | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76532.epub.noimages | 349 kB | |||
| Kindle | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76532.kf8.images | 1.2 MB | |||
| older Kindles | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76532.kindle.images | 935 kB | |||
| Plain Text UTF-8 | https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/76532.txt.utf-8 | 299 kB | |||
| Download HTML (zip) | https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/76532/pg76532-h.zip | 1012 kB | |||
| There may be more files related to this item. | |||||
Similar Books
About this eBook
| Author | Aspinwall, Marguerite, 1888-1982 |
|---|---|
| Title | Gay's year on Sunset Island |
| Original Publication | Cleveland: The Goldsmith Publishing Co., 1926. |
| Credits | Susan E., David E. Brown, Rod Crawford, Kelsey Nakaishi, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Reading Level | Reading ease score: 75.0 (7th grade). Fairly easy to read. |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PZ: Language and Literatures: Juvenile belles lettres |
| Subject | Islands -- Juvenile fiction |
| Subject | Adventure stories |
| Subject | Treasure troves -- Juvenile fiction |
| Subject | Teenage girls -- Juvenile fiction |
| Subject | Families -- Juvenile fiction |
| Category | Text |
| EBook-No. | 76532 |
| Release Date | Jul 20, 2025 |
| Copyright Status | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 167 downloads in the last 30 days. |
| Project Gutenberg eBooks are always free! | |