Blackbeard nodded. “I was sure you’d figured that out. Yes, old Hurwood plans to raise his wife’s ghost from her dried head and plant it in the body of his daughter. Hard luck on the daughter, left with no body…”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (JUN 12, 2011)

My review is of a paperback reprint of a Tim Powers novel, On Stranger Tides, first published to a good deal of critical acclaim in 1987. No doubt the success of the new movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides inspired the reprint.

Voodoo plays a major role in this novel, in particular with regard to resurrection. Voodoo and other western systems of magic are all tied up with the relationship between magic, blood (and its analog, sea water) and cold iron. It turns out according to this tale at least that cold iron quenches magic. The magic of Europe has been much diminished in the 17th century due to steel, armor, swords and the other trappings of European material culture. Magic flourishes in the western hemisphere where blood still rules over steel. Blood is the antithesis of cold steel; it is likened to hot iron. Magicians typically have white gums because so much of their blood is in use for magic that they suffer congenital anemia.

Oh, and there are pirates galore; most notably Blackbeard, who we discover is a powerful magician in his own right. Blackbeard’s historic practice of going into battle with lit candles woven into his beard is explained by the revelation in this tale that his patron voodoo demon, his loa, is summoned by smoldering fire. Later in the story a lit cigar serves the same purpose.

Some truly freakish and slimy souls inhabit Powers’ Caribbean world of 17th century. The good people in our tale are not all that good or pure, but they at least try. The bad ones like Blackbeard and Hurwood are truly awful. Hurwood is clearly psychotic, driven to madness by the death of his wife. In his madness he carries her rotting head in a basket and has plotted to resurrect her soul into the body of his daughter, leaving the daughter without a body to call her own. Blackbeard captains a ship of zombies. Among Blackbeard’s other atrocities is manipulating someone to bludgeon-murder his wife in order to be blackmailed into becoming a vassal pirate.

In some ways it is odd to speak to anachronism or logical irregularity in a work about invented magic, but there is one thing that stands out as being off. Hurwood is a University Don, a scholar, who knows the work of Newton and the most up to date developments in science. His explanation of the magic environment surrounding the Fountain of Youth is profoundly anachronistic. He corresponds the locale to a quantum system with some features so precisely known that other aspects are required to be correspondingly unknowable. It should be noted that Newton, who many believe was the archetypical scientist, in reality spent a great deal of his professional life involved with alchemy, and can well be thought of as a magician in his own right. No one from that time and place could have entered into the mind-set of quantum uncertainty. Another quibble is that Jack Shandy, the protagonist is less interesting than the bad guys. Additionally, his love interest, Beth, Hurwood’s daughter, is almost a non-entity. It is not that Jack is two-dimensional or just a purely good guy; he has killed, betrayed and he clearly loves. His back-story is interesting. It is just that he comes off as somewhat vapid by comparison.

Powers is an extremely gifted storyteller His wit is unfailingly dry and brilliant. His powers of bizarre invention are pretty amazing. The plot flows, jumps and bubbles weaving one fantastic invention after another. I enjoyed On Stranger Tides a great deal and I am eager for the next gem from this wizard of off beat fantasy. Readers should be encouraged to explore the long list of his fantastic novels.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 57 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper Paperbacks; Reprint edition (April 26, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Tim Powers
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton

Bibliography:

• The Skies Discrowned (1976)
• An Epitaph in Rust (1976)
• The Drawing of the Dark (1979)
• The Anubis Gate (1983) 
• Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (1985)
• On Stranger Tides (1987; April 2011)
• The Stress of Her Regard (1989)
• Night Moves and Other Stories (2000)
• Declare (2001)
• Three Days to Never (2006)

Fault Lines:

• Last Call (1992)
• Expiration (1995)
• Earthquake Weather (1997)

Movies from Books

• Pirates of the Carribean: On Stranger Tides (May 2011)

“Who are we, really? Are our souls shaped, our fates written in full by God, before we draw our first breath? Do we make ourselves, by the choices we our selves make? Or are we clay merely, that is molded and pushed into the shape that our betters propose for us?”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (MAY 03, 2011)

What becomes of those who independently and courageously navigate the intellectual and cultural shoals that divide cultures? Is it truly possible to make those crossings without relinquishing one’s very identity?

Geraldine Brooks poignantly explores these questions in her latest novel, Caleb’s Crossing. The story is based on sketchy knowledge of the life of Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk – the first Native American to graduate from Harvard College — and a member of the Wampanoag tribe in what is now Martha’s Vineyard.

This is truly a work of imagination since the sources on Caleb’s brief, tragic, and remarkable life are scant. The voice belongs to the fictional Bethia Mayfield, a minister’s quick-minded daughter who gently (and sometimes, not so gently) defies the rigid expectations of a Calvinistic society that demand silence and obedience from its womenfolk.

As outsiders, both Bethia and Caleb – who meet on the cusp of adolescence – quickly bond and form a lifelong friendship. On the sly, Bethia absorbs the language and the cultures of the Wopanaak tribe while out in the field; at home, she secretly absorbs lessons that are meant for her brother Makepeace.

Eventually, both serendipitously find themselves at Cambridge. Caleb’s Harvard education – conducted in the classical languages of Latin, Greek and Hebrew – is funded by rich English patrons as an experiment as to whether “salvages” can be indoctrinated into Christian culture alongside the dismissive colonial elite. Bethia goes along with Caleb and Makepeace as indentured help, striving to remain in close proximity to scholars and avoid her fate as yet another small settlement farm wife.

There are plenty of twists and turns, trauma and heartbreak, celebrations and sadness along the way; after all, Geraldine Brooks already has a reputation as an absorbing story teller who is able to imaginatively use history to fictional ends. And it would be unfair to even allude to some of these page-turning plot developments.

The themes, though, are fair game. This novel particularly shines when it touches upon matters of faith, which rely heavily upon John Cotton, Jr.’s account of his conversations with native islanders in the 1660s missionary journals (according to the author in her epilogue). The pantheistic view of the medicine men is placed in a high-stakes battle against strict and judgmental Calvinism time and again. Bethia muses, “It galls me, when I catch a stray remark from the master, or between the older English pupils, to the effect that the Indians are uncommonly fortunate to be here. I have come to think it is a fault in us, to credit what we give in such a case, and never to consider what must be given up in order to receive it.”

Ms. Brooks drums that point home – sometimes a bit too firmly, not relying enough on the reader to form his or her own conclusions. Still, there is intense observation in the “civilizing” of Caleb’s crossing to the world inhabited uneasily by Bethia. She reflects, “In that shimmering, golden light I saw the wild boy I had met here four summers past, no longer wild, nor boy. The hair was cut short and plain, the fringed deer hide leggings replaced with sensible black serge. The wampum ornaments were gone, the bare mahogany arms sheathed now in billowing linen. Yet neither was the youth who stood before me some replica of a young Englishman…” The story of Caleb and Bethia is part of an age-old battle of repressive and misguided individuals who callously use religion to assert dominancy, superiority, and control over others.

As a result, destiny and preordination wrestle as the boundaries of both cultures are movingly explored in a voice that may be described as “period language.” From the natural beauty of an early Martha’s Vineyard to the drafty dormitories of Harvard College, this fictional work includes a wallop of historical fact. Those who have thrilled to other Geraldine Brooks’ absorbingly told novels – March, Year of Wonders, People of the Book—will find yet one more reason to rejoice.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 99 readers
PUBLISHER:	Viking Adult (May 3, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Geraldine Brooks
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:People of the Book An historical novel set on the adjacent Massachusette island of Nantucket: Ahab’s Wife, the Stargazer by Sena Jeter Naslund

Bibliography:

• Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague
• March (March 2005)
• People of the Book (January 2008)
• Caleb’s Crossing (May 2011)

Nonfiction:

• Foreign Correspondence (1994)
• Nine Parts of Desire The Hidden World of Islamic Women (December 1994)

“She breathed in the wolf’s scent, a scent brought from ceaseless roaming over darkened fields and haunted fens, through gates of slanting twilight. The odor, both sharp and intimate, offered up the violent submission of the kill and a no less forceful submission into coupling.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman (DEC 12, 2010)

There is a brutish energy in Kathleen Kent’s prequel to her well-received Heretic’s Daughter, a comingling of harsh animalistic dangers with politics, power and passion. The howling wolves that come for their prey are both the two-legged and the four-legged kind, and each will stop at nothing to prevail.

The Wolves of Andover opens with the introduction of Martha Allen, a resourceful and sharp-tongued young woman who is forced to take the position of glorified servant to her weak-willed cousin Patience, who is expecting her third child in colonial Massachusetts. There she meets a giant of a man, the Welshman Thomas Carrier, a hired worker with an air of mystery. It is rumored that for the love of Oliver Cromwell’s cause, he took an axe to the head of King Charles I and now has a bounty on his own head.

For Martha, Patience, Thomas and the other characters, life in the colonies is not easy. They must deal daily with threats of the plague, famished and hostile Indians, hard toil, and of course, the ever-present danger of the wolves. And the dangers lurk not in the community, but from overseas. Unbeknownst to Thomas, King Charles II has ordered a group of brutal Royalist minions to cross the ocean and bring Thomas back to be drawn and quartered for killing his father.

The two stories – that of Martha and Thomas in the colonies and the expertly trained and thuggish killers who are determined to capture Thomas – are juxtaposed, each highlighting the same theme: the courage and independence that are demanded in a time of danger and change.

Kathleen Kent does not shy away from darkness. She depicts everyday life in all its gore: an injured and frightened lamb being used as bait, a horrific recounting of a pit bull dog fight, the impressments of a young lad who is destined to be thrown overboard, the capture and burning of conspirators at the hands of some Indians. Those who have read Heretic’s Daughter know that this is not an author who will whitewash the quest for survival or the challenges of day-to-day existence in an often-unfair world.

Even the progression of the love between Martha and Thomas is tempered by harshness dashed with a dollop of sweetness. At one point, Thomas pauses to tell her, “You are the deer shot through with arrows whose heart grows cold for want of being taken.” And eventually: “But for this day, we live. So bide with me. Bide with me and take from me what you can, as I will from you. And however long we walk this earth, we can stand for one another…”

The book falters a bit when it takes the reader away from the main action to the back streets of London or the tempestuous times aboard a creaky merchant ship. Knowing that this is a prequel, the suspense of the hunt for Thomas is stunted. But then The Wolves of Andover always rights itself and shines, capturing – through Thomas’s telling – the turbulent times and battle between Charles I and Cromwell and focusing on life in the plucky colonies and the budding romance of Martha and Thomas.

It bears mentioning that Kathleen Kent is a descendant of the real Martha Allen Carrier, who was hung as a witch during the Salem trials of 1692. She does her ancestor proud with a book that is admittedly not an historical recreation, but rather a page-turning book of historical fiction (emphasis on the fiction) that, once started, is impossible to put down.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Reagan Arthur Books (November 8, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Kathleen Kent
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The Heretic’s Daughter

Bibliography:

• The Heretic’s Daughter (September 2008)
• The Wolves of Andover (November 2010) (aka THE TRAITOR’S WIFE)

And at that moment Lazue shouted, “Sail ho!”

Straining his eye to the glass, Hunter saw square canvas directly astern, coming above the line of the horizon. He turned back to Enders, but the sea artist was already making orders to run out all the canvas El Trinidad possessed. The topgallants were unreefed; the foresprit was run up, and the galleon gathered speed.

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (JAN 9, 2010)

Pure fun, Crichton’s posthumous pirate novel swashbuckles from dastardly deed to deadly danger and, just when all is lost, cobbles together ingenuity and luck to sail another day of derring-do.

It’s 1665 on the remote British colony of Jamaica where “privateers” keep the economy humming. News arrives of an especially rich Spanish prize anchored in the harbor of an island fortress, an impenetrable place bristling with cliffs, swamps and jungles and crawling with Spanish soldiers.

The previous year an assault on the island took the lives of the entire 300-man force, save one. That one, Whisper, his voice lost to a Spanish cutlass, is a broken man. But not even Whisper’s catalogue of deadly obstacles can deter our handsome hero, Capt. Charles Hunter, who mulls the information and assembles a crew of talented cutthroats.

Among them is the crafty Frenchman Sanson, “the most ruthless killer in all the Caribbean;” Basso, the tongueless “Moor,” a giant of a man who makes a living being underestimated; Lazue, a lithe, eagle-eyed woman who lives as a man but bares her breasts in battle to disorient the enemy; Don Diego the Jew, whose talent with explosives is beyond genius (encompassing a special invention involving the fresh intestines of rats), and Mr. Enders, the “sea artist” and surgeon whose skill as a helmsman is legendary.

Needless to say, none of these talents will go to waste as Hunter braves every peril land, sea and foe can throw up against him in a page-turner that never flags.

Soon to be a Spielberg movie, if rumor has it right, this one features no complicated characters or deep moments (unless sea monsters count?), just (fake) blood-soaked escapist fun.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 379 readers
PUBLISHER:	Harper (November 24, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Michael Crichton
EXTRAS:	Audio Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:NEXT State of Fear Prey Airframe

Bibliography:

• The Andromeda Strain (1969)
• The Terminal Man (1972)
• The Great Train Robbery (1975)
• Eaters of the Dead (1976) (also called The 13th Warrior)
• Congo (1980)
• Sphere (1987)
• Jurassic Park (1990)
• Rising Sun (1992)
• Disclosure (1994)
• The Lost World (1995)
• Airframe (1996)
• Timeline (November 1999)
• PREY (November 2002)
• State of Fear (December 2004)
• NEXT (November 2006)
• Pirate Latitudes (November 2009)
• Micro (November 2011)

Published as Jeffrey Hudson:

• A Case of Need (1968)

Non-fiction:

• Travels (1998)

Movies from books:

• The Andromeda Strain (1971)
• The Terminal Man (1974)
• The Great Train Robbery (1979)
• Disclosure (1994)
• Jurassic Park (1993)
• Rising Sun (1993)
• Congo (1995)
• Sphere (1998)
• The 13th Warrior (2000)
• Timeline (April 2004)