COLOR OF FIRE

A woman takes to the sea to find her missing husband in this conclusion to Giordano’s Strange Eden trilogy.

The novel opens in New Providence, an island in the Bahamas, in the spring of 1794—nearly three years after Lady Eliza Sharpe left her English home to join her husband, Charles, at Pleasant Hall. Now she’s in crisis. Charles has been missing for two weeks, following their failed attempt to free an enslaved person on their property. In Charles’ absence, Lord Dunmore sends a flood of creditors to Pleasant Hall claiming debts that Eliza can’t disprove. As a woman with almost no legal standing, she finds herself dismissed and patronized: “They treated her like a foolish girl. They couldn’t even afford her the respect of a woman.” The visitors threaten not only her home, but also the enslaved people that she and Charles have vowed to release from bondage—an act that would destabilize Nassau’s economic order. Eliza is sure that her spouse is alive, despite others’ insistence that he’s dead. When Capt. Hiram Bruin, a privateer described as “deranged, violent, and show[ing] little mercy for women,” comes to Pleasant Hall to kill Eliza, she persuades him to instead accompany her on a quest to find Charles. Although she soon changes her mind, he subsequently drugs and kidnaps her, setting the stage for months of harrowing confinement on a ship. Parallel chapters follow Charles, who awakens on another vessel that harbors a brutal shipboard fight ring; he’s determined to escape and reunite with Eliza.

Once the novel heads out to sea, Eliza is concerned almost exclusively with her own survival and locating Charles, which leaved the fate of the enslaved people at Pleasant Hall frustratingly unexamined. Still, the book offers a compelling, if uncomfortable, portrayal of racist hierarchies persisting even in the worlds of privateers and pirates. The prose is strikingly vivid, lingering on dazzling natural beauty (“neighboring mountainous islands, looming so large and vast that she felt as though she could grasp them”) and the visceral brutality of shipboard violence (“Bodies laid sprawled all over the deck, their hot blood running in thin rivulets”). Longtime readers of the series will appreciate the deepening of Eliza and Charles’ once-rocky relationship, although some may struggle to forgive earlier violent behavior, which this installment reframes. New readers, however, will be able to jump right in, as well-placed flashbacks from prior entries fill in gaps without slowing momentum. The story is enriched by its mythological echoes—most explicitly the Orpheus/Eurydice dynamic acknowledged by Eliza, but also the wandering trials of Homer’s Odyssey, which lend an epic scale to Eliza’s and Charles’ struggles. The persistent threat of sexual violence in this narrative, while historically grounded, may deter some readers, and one major twist could have been revealed later in the narrative to deliver a fuller shock. Ultimately, though, the novel challenges readers to confront “what you would do if you lost what you value most.”

An unforgettable and storm-lashed tale of two lovers fighting their way back to each other against the odds.