NATHALIE

The author mines her genealogy for this story of the expulsion of the Acadians.

This brutal, mid-18th-century act of ethnic cleansing, carried out by the British army against peaceful, French Catholic farming and fishing families in what is now Nova Scotia, is ripe with drama. Unfortunately, little of that comes through in the tale of Nathalie Belliveau, who at 13 finds herself separated from her family as they are forced aboard a ship bound for New England. She is separated again from the family with whom she finds refuge—and a betrothed—when they in turn are deported. Ange, her beloved, and his family fetch up in Massachusetts, but Nathalie is taken to North Carolina, where she is indentured to a slave owner and his French-speaking wife. Nathalie’s and Ange’s travails unfold in prose weighed down with unnecessary detail and in often painfully expository dialogue. One-dimensional, idealized characterizations prevent reader engagement: Ange comes across as something of a prig, and Nathalie’s predictable goodness is interrupted only by a gratuitous, consequence-free instance of premarital sex. The cast is mostly White, though there are stiff encounters with a band of helpful Mi’kmaq people and cringeworthy ones with dialect-speaking Black characters. The Grand Dérangement deserves a compelling story; this is not it.

It’s hard to imagine the reader who’ll willingly persist past the first few pages.