The Sea Captains Wife - Book Review

Post

Subscribe

The Sea Captain’s Wife - Book Review


One of Australia’s most beloved authors is back with a new historical fiction novel The Sea Captain’s Wife , a story of love, family, murder, mystery, and mutiny on the high seas as Mair and Michael navigate love and life, and being from two different cultures.

Mair Rodrigues Lestrange McCrae lives on Big Henry Island, somewhere near the Cape of Good Hope in the Southern Hemisphere. It’s an island where women are in charge, and where a recent catastrophe has taken all the men – apart from the older men and the male children (called pickins) – in a Big Wave. Mair is out looking for a beachie to be her husband and wear her socks when she finds Michael, who has been thrown from his ship. Michael is the heir to a shipping firm in Australia, in search of a ghost ship and its golden cargo.

When Michael notices the island is under threat from the volcano on Big Henry, Mair agrees to go back to Australia with him – until a mysterious string of deaths threatens to upend Mair’s new life in Sydney – and Mair is the only one who notices things are not quite what they seem, but can she convince her new family of this?

The latest offering from Jackie French is a bit of a departure from her usual work. She’s still centring women’s voices and lives in history, still letting them take charge of the narrative and working to change things from within. But she has never written a murder mystery, and many of her books are anchored to a specific historical event. But this is also, in Jackie’s own words, a rebuttal to Lord of the Flies that began at school – a what if women ran the island scenario, and I found that it worked quite well. It explored the way a different culture was established and developed separate from the rest of the world, resulting in a bit of a culture clash between Mair and those in Sydney.

Mair is loyal and creative despite feeling out of place – and I felt that Jackie French portrayed this well. As the strange deaths occurred, and more information about the family was revealed, I could see that the seeds of doubt against one character were being placed, and it was Mair’s perceptiveness that alerted me to this. Perhaps as an outsider to the society she was now part of helped – she could see what did and didn’t fit and was a bit more on alert for unusual behaviour as tragedy continued to befall the family – and as lies grow and grow.

I loved that Mair never gave up trying to uncover the mystery and finding ways to fit in with her new family, seeking acceptance in a world that was hostile towards her at first. It is an exceptional book that shows how society has developed and how different societies develop and operate as well. I found this to be a very clever story, where things seem like they’re not connected but they really are. It was an intriguing concept and delivered beautifully in the hands of Jackie French.


Published 6th March by HarperCollins Australia
480 pp

%wneverywhere

#book_reviews
#books
#libraries
#literary
#books_writing
#fun_things_to_do
#arts_culture