An engaging, swashbuckling tale of love and revenge during the age of piracy.
A Barbadian fugitive joins a pirate crew in this historical romance.
It’s the dawn of the age of piracy. Dinny Obosi has grown up an enslaved person on a Barbados plantation, the daughter of a Black man and an Irishwoman. Seeing the way the master, Owen Craig, looks at her, Dinny’s father arranges for her and her twin brother, Jimmie, to escape to Jamaica aboard a pirate ship—though not quickly enough to save her from a traumatic rape. With the help of a Chinese-born sailor named Lei, the twins board the ship Hades. Lei is infatuated with Dinny at first sight, and she is likewise ensnared by the mysterious seaman and his not-so-humble origins: “Lei’s comeliness moved her in the way a sunset might, one with colors and patterns she had never seen before. Every aspect of him entranced her. His eyes, so lovely—of course, she had seen striking eyes before, but none seemed to really see her.” Meanwhile, in Jamaica, Dinny’s cousin Ami is haunted by the ghostly vision of a Huguenot family facing persecution in France. The family turns out to be a real one, and the two surviving brothers, Ivan and Pax Durfort, are in the process of indenturing themselves as servants to a captain in order to win passage to the Caribbean, where they will crash right into the Obosi family’s destiny. When Lei and the other pirates—who consider Dinny to be a “daughter to the Hades” and therefore under their protection—launch a vendetta against Owen, they awaken the wrath of the man’s father, the powerful Adm. David Craig. Dinny takes to the pirate life—and the pirate prince that rescued her—but can she survive in such a dangerous line of work? As she and the crew of the Hades make their way across the Caribbean, they discover a powder keg of enslaved people, indentured servants, maroons, and outlaws waiting to explode.
In this series opener, Little delivers in terms of high-seas adventure, evoking the period and settings with her detailed prose: “Sugarcane-mantled hills rose and fell beneath the clear night sky as the moon neared the end of its journey in the western sky. Dinny, Lei, and Jimmie paused after reassuring themselves that they had lost the slave catchers. They stood at the top edge of a sloping terrace overlooking the coastal plains.” While the rhythms of the plot will be familiar to readers of historical romance novels, the main characters—and Lei, in particular—are original in ways that set them apart from the standard figures that populate the genre. Part of it is the diversity of backgrounds: The author deftly foregrounds the ways race, class, gender, and sexual orientation operate in the time period. Events of the plot sometimes feel contrived, and the sex scenes are often a bit over-the-top—even for such a romantic environment—but the book is generally immersive and entertaining. Readers looking for a pirate-based romance featuring a more diverse set of characters will likely enjoy this offering and look forward to the sequel.
An engaging, swashbuckling tale of love and revenge during the age of piracy.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-944428-68-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Inklings Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
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A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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