Nails the traits of a classic pirate tale, with romance and family melodrama to hold the story together.
In Sturgill’s (Dreams from the Heart: Tales of Hope & Love, 2013) adventure novel, a young kidnapped boy is raised among pirates while his brother becomes a naval officer and swears vengeance against the marauders.
In the early 19th century, 6-year-old Henry Wellington is traveling from England to the United States with his father and older brother, James, on a merchant ship when pirates besiege the vessel. Capt. Bloodstone kills Henry’s father but takes Henry, believing the hawk-shaped birthmark on Henry’s chest makes him “marked by the gods.” James, meanwhile, is saved from the fiery wreckage by the passing USS Enterprise. Henry, now called Hawk, remembers little about his family and grows into a skilled and formidable pirate, but when the teenager meets and falls in love with Anna, a young prostitute, he considers leaving behind the only life he’s really known. Abandoning the pirate life isn’t so easy, however, especially when the quartermaster, aptly named Diablo, is envious of the crew’s admiration of Hawk and would rather see the boy dead than be Bloodstone’s successor, and the U.S. Navy’s New Orleans Squadron, including Lt. James Wellington, who presumes his brother is dead, has been established specifically for hunting pirates. The book doesn’t skimp on the hallmarks that pirate fans look for—there are plenty of eye-patches, peg legs and the occasional “Arrr!” But pitting the two estranged brothers against each other adds substantial depth, particularly since Henry’s birthmark is so discernible and makes the scene in which James recognizes him almost inevitable. There’s also an effective mingling of the notions of good and bad; Henry and other pirates, like his friend Wesley, the cook, look squeaky clean next to Bloodstone and Diablo, who are far more bloodthirsty, while James’ relentless pursuit of pirates recalls Bloodstone’s attack in the beginning, as the Squadron kills men and leaves ships in flames. Henry and Anna are smitten rather quickly, but their burgeoning relationship opens the door for a much more riveting quandary, as Henry must decide between his love for his woman or his love of the sea. The story has its slower moments, most notably with the young couple, but lovers of the genre will be appeased with copious action scenes featuring guns, swords, duels and cannon fire.
Nails the traits of a classic pirate tale, with romance and family melodrama to hold the story together.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2014
ISBN: 978-0988565333
Page Count: 330
Publisher: DreamHeart Books
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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