PELICAN GIRLS

Malye describes the French colonization of 18th-century La Louisiane with exacting detail through the eyes of women ordered there by the French government to become wives.

In 1720, the Superioress of La Salpêtrière, a combination orphanage/reformatory/prison for wayward women, is ordered to choose 90 inmates to cross the sea to help bolster the struggling French American colony. She’s not sure whether she’s offering them a fresh start or a death sentence, given the weather, disease and warfare in La Louisiane. During the months-long voyage, three of the travelers form deep bonds. Twenty-two-year-old Geneviève Menu, who has fended for herself since her parents’ deaths when she was 11, is glad to avoid incarceration as an abortionist. Sensitive, eccentric Pétronille Béranger must leave the “golden cell” reserved for wealthy outcasts since her family has stopped paying her board. La Salpêtrière is the only home 12-year-old orphan Charlotte Couturier has known, but she begs to go after her only friend is chosen. Over the next 15 years in La Louisiane, Geneviève is widowed by three husbands, all named Pierre (this earnest novel’s one humorous note), while Pétronille maintains her tepid but comfortable marriage until forced to make a life-or-death choice for her children’s sake. Widowed at 19 and childless, Charlotte moves into a convent. Malye paints a detailed, obviously well-researched portrait of the socioeconomics, physical hardships, and treacherous natural beauty of La Louisiane as seen through these women’s eyes—and also, briefly, in a significant counterpoint, through the eyes of Utu’wv Ecoko’nesel, Pétronille’s unlikely Natchez friend and protector, who expresses her people’s abiding anger over the French belief that Natchez land “could be divided into parts and handed over.” Unfortunately, Utu’wv Ecoko’nesel is never made more than a noble symbol, while the French women become fully realized, individual admixtures of strengths and weaknesses. Inevitably, all find their greatest solace in female relationships, both platonic and sexual.

The women’s emotionally complex stories are more potent than the author’s ambitious, sometimes murky, take on history.