The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos by Kendra Langford Shaw

Posted on April 3, 2026 by pagesofjulia

In the Arctic, homesteaders dive for antique pianos and struggle to survive in this compulsively readable first novel of adventure and familial love.

“My little brother, Finley, drowned the first time wrestling the Napoleon pianoforte under the galactic starlight of an Arctic sunset; the way he later told the story, the piano had it coming.” The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos is a wildly imaginative story centered on the adventures and trials of a homesteader family in the Arctic. Kendra Langford Shaw’s first novel follows these determined renegades as they establish and struggle to keep lives, livelihoods, homes, and community in a tremendously harsh environment.

Chapters alternate between characters and perspectives, beginning with siblings Milda, Finley, and Temperance; their parents, Viola and Fry; their ancestor Moose Bloomer, who began his immigration to the Arctic Territory as part of a large train of settlers but was, at 12, one of a few survivors to make it onto the permafrost; and the shrinking but hardy next generation. In a fantastical twist, each settler family brought a wildly impractical piece of equipment. “Issuing each family a map and an orange flag, the deed to their land hing[ed] upon their ability to ‘civilize.’ They were required to bring salt pork, botanical texts, and pianos–music, music being what would elevate the territory from raw, unbroken land into a homeland worth having.” Moose’s train lost and abandoned pianos across the region before settling and striving; pianofortes, surprisingly preserved by freezing waters, washed about the floors of the ocean and the Kamikaze River. Later homesteaders work as piano hunters. Antiques pulled up from the deep command impressive prices. Readers meet Finley when he is a young boy obsessed with recovering his family’s Napoleon, and this obsession will guide several lives.

In this strange Arctic world in which sunken pianos are desirable prey and their ivory keys can be found in the bellies of trout, glaciers melt, sea levels rise, and scant resources dwindle. Families battle the elements for survival, and they love one another in traditional and nontraditional ways. Viola, Fry, and their children live in a house on stilts, farming octopus and collecting sea beans, with a sea lion as a pet. They yearn only for “what other families had long ago achieved in terms of the conveniences of modern life: sanitation and heating ducts, coffee, dental work, telescopes, beehives.” Shaw’s imagination is broad, her characters delightful, and their fates often painful but also transcendent. The Pillagers’ Guide to Arctic Pianos is a lovely profile of a singular, stark place and a small, tight cast of indelibly colorful characters: a heart-wrenching, unforgettable debut.

This review originally ran in the March 23, 2026 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 pips.

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So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix by Bethany C. Morrow

Posted on March 27, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I like these remixes, and I remember Little Women with a warm fondness. Louisa May Alcott’s novel championed strong, outspoken women and questioned classism; and it offered a cozy picture of a certain type of society: in my memory, one that only included white people. Here, Bethany C. Morrow recasts the story in a different frame. Four sisters, bridging girlhood and adulthood, with their adored mother, navigate many changes in a world that is also fast-changing. Their beloved father is away at war or supporting postwar efforts. The novel opens in 1863, and the March family are among the residents of the newly established Roanoke Island Freedpeople Colony. They have their own house, with multiple rooms. Meg teaches the colony’s children to read and write, although she must do so in tents, because the white missionary teachers claim the buildings. Jo and a group of young men work building more houses for the constant influx of new residents. Bethlehem is a whiz of a seamstress, making new clothes for the colony’s people from what the former enslavers left behind. Amethyst wishes to study, to dance, to live all of life; but at 14, she is subject to her family’s wish for her to stay a child a little longer. She helps Beth where she can. Mammy takes transcription for the (white) officers who run the colony.

True to the original, Meg is a nurturer who yearns for her own family; her wish for a husband drives the earliest plot action. Jo is a great thinker and, within the household, speechmaker; it takes her family to encourage her to begin writing down her thoughts, which here center on the value of the freedpeople’s colony. She is driven to argue in favor of such projects, to fundraise, to seek the independence of her community which is so far too dependent and beholden on white folks who, though Northern and not enslavers, still hold the power and purse strings, and consider Black folks inferior. Beth is still sickly, kindhearted, and supportive, and Amy is still a firebrand in her own ways. There is still a Lorie – Jo’s Lorie – who is devoted to her but also challenges her with his different opinions about the best way forward for Black southerners.

These characters debate, for example, the advantages of the freedpeople’s colony versus moving north or beyond, including to Liberia. They question the nature of freedom, and what to do with the limited progress they’ve seen so far: to be no longer enslaved is certainly good, but doesn’t make them want to fall at the feet of white abolitionists in gratitude, because it is only right. And to be free from enslavement doesn’t mean they don’t feel a boot on their neck in many ways. Such debates within the structure of a novel don’t always work for me – they can feel forced or unnatural within dialog. But that’s not the case here. For whatever it’s worth, I find this device true to Alcott’s original, and in both versions, I think it feels true to the characters themselves. One thing I believe we love about the Marches is that they are actively engaging with their world and with one another, in both stories, discussing what they see around them and how they want to be in the world. I think it works, and I think it feels to-the-minute relevant in 2026.

I loved seeing these March sisters head in different directions than Alcott’s did. It’s hard not to tell you here where they go and what they find there – please go read this book.

Rating: 7 skates.

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The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow by Katherine Woodfine

Posted on March 13, 2026 by pagesofjulia

I picked this paperback up in a coffee shop where it had been abandoned with other, clearly used magazines and newspapers and such. It just looked fun: the cover, the back blurb. I read a few chapters that night and otherwise finished it in a single sitting. Fun fact: Amazon rates this book as being for ages 11-14, or grades 1-3. (Facepalm.) At any rate, it would be friendly for younger readers – I’d go with the age range rather than the grades listed there – but, obviously, was plenty enjoyable for this adult.

In the first years of the 1900s, a sumptuous new department store is set to open, one like London has never seen. Our protagonist is Sophie Taylor. She lost her mother young, and now, at age fourteen, she has just lost her father, a mostly-absent but loving military man. Raised in comfortable wealth, she’s now orphaned and on her own. Plucky Sophie feels lucky to have landed a job at Sinclair’s, where she’ll work in millinery and earn just enough for a spartan room in a working girls’ boarding house. But the night before the store is set to open, a priceless object is stolen: a jewel-encrusted clockwork sparrow that purportedly plays a unique song each time it’s wound. A young man is attacked in the commission of the burglary. And, in an unlikely twist, the cultured Sophie is implicated! Luckily, she has already made some new friends: junior porter Billy, who tends to get lost in his books; indomitable Lil, a chorus girl and ‘dress mannequin’; and perhaps even a less savory character with secrets of his own. Together, the young people set out to solve a mystery – or several of them – and clear Sophie’s good name. But the case is increasingly complicated, as major organized crime, police corruption, and shopgirl dramas intertwine. And the stakes get higher, as livelihoods and even lives are revealed to be at stake. But Sophie, Lil, Billy and Joe are not pushovers. They rise to the occasion. A delightful sequel is already headed my way. This is a series of four books so far!

The Mystery of the Clockwork Sparrow does indeed involve the grand, the daring, the dastardly, and the bold, as the back cover claims. I found it a delicious tale of adventure, friendship, and self-determination, not to mention mystery, danger, and code-breaking. I can’t wait to follow up with our two strong female leads. Best book picked up off a coffee shop table in years!

Rating: 8 iced buns.

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A Power Unbound by Freya Marske

Posted on January 23, 2026 by pagesofjulia

Same disclaimer as last time.

Well, it is early in the year for this, but I have possibly found the best book of the year. I am crazy about this Last Binding trilogy.

Book three, like the two before it, centers around one couple that makes a connection and then sizzles hot. But it also advances the world-level plot that’s been building in all three books: a group of powerful and power-hungry magicians, of the sort who hold enormous social capital, titles, and wealth as well as magic, aim to monopolize still further, stealing power from the bulk of magical humankind. It’s egregious, but very human of them. Our motley crew, which now comprises Violet, Maud, Robin, Edwin, Addie, Jack, and Alan, aims to stop them. But despite their combined riches in titles, wealth, magical power and expertise, smarts and pure scrappiness, our group pales in comparison to the established power of magical England. It’s grim, in fact.

Alongside the trilogy’s thread about magical power and threat to the world – with a growing sense of social justice, thanks not least of all to Alan’s contributions – and a delightful romantic-and-sexy thread with our third couple to take center stage, there is a growing sense that these friends are building something beautiful as a group. Several, or nearly all, of these protagonists considered themselves loners when the story began. One important but understated headline to A Power Unbound is that they are no longer alone, but members of the kind of built family that will take care of one another in the most important and profound ways.

I cannot understate how devastated I was to finish this book. I don’t remember the last time I was this sad about there being no more. I’m relieved to learn that Marske has two other novels, which you’ll hear from me about soon. But gosh. The Last Binding. I can’t believe I’m going to live without this group of funny, plucky, curious, hard-loving young people. Here in the first month of the year, I think this is the one to beat. All hail.

Rating: 10 cufflinks.

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A Restless Truth by Freya Marske

Posted on January 12, 2026 by pagesofjulia

As is my more-or-less usual practice, this review will contain spoilers for the book that preceded it in the series, but not so much for this book itself.

Book two was every bit as good as book one.

We’ve made a pretty thorough shift away from that cast of characters. Robin and Edwin are still there, but off-screen. In my review of that first book, I mentioned Robin’s beloved younger sister only as such, without even giving her name: that’s how minor a character she was there, but here, Maud stars. She has been assigned (at her own insistence) the duty of bringing back from America to Britain a most important Mrs. Navenby, member of the Forsythia Club alongside the now deceased (see book one) Flora Sutton. In the novel’s opening scene, we see Mrs. Navenby murdered, onboard the ship Lyric en route to London. This leaves Maud Blyth, under the pseudonym Maud Cutler, alone in her remaining task to bring home, if not the wisdom of Mrs. Navenby, at least her piece of the Last Contract. Unfortunately Maud does not even know what form that piece might take.

In short order, the enterprising if not terribly worldly “Miss Cutler” manages to enlist the help of Lord Hawthorn (who we met in book one) and a new acquaintance, Miss Violet Debenham, a thoroughly disgraced member of a good English family who has been living in New York and acting in the theatre (horrors), although she is now set to inherit from an also somewhat disgraced but very wealthy and now dead relative. Along the way to identifying and protecting or recovering Mrs. Navenby’s magical item (piece of the Last Contract), Maud’s crew will pick up a journalist who is also a jewel thief and pornography dealer. Maud takes a special interest in the pornography; she takes advantage of this voyage to become a little more worldly. The novel’s title comes in when her new lover must confront their own resistance to the vulnerability that comes with honesty – in contrast to Maud’s fanatical unwillingness to tell a lie. Whew.

A Restless Truth, like A Marvellous Light, excels at the fine details of historical setting, the meticulous building of this magical world, and the absolute rush of discovery that comes with good love and/or sex. I am breathless with anticipation for book three.

Rating: 9 parrots.

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When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill (audio)

Posted on December 15, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I don’t recall where I got this title from, but I loved this book, and am grateful to whatever review or list sent it my way. Also to my lovely partner who gifted it to me for the long drive from Texas to West Virginia.

When Women Were Dragons: Being the Truthful Accounting of the Life of Alex Green–Physicist, Professor, Activist. Still Human. A memoir, of sorts is a living, breathing tale, ever expanding, filled with metaphor that reshapes itself with the reader’s interpretation. It opens with a strange letter from a Nebraska housewife in 1898 to her mother, shortly before the woman spontaneously dragoned. Next we have an excerpt from the opening statement given by Dr. Henry Gantz to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1957. Then we get into the first-person narration of Alex Green, who will tell most of this story, with brief insertions mostly from Dr. Gantz’s work – bit of an epistolary format. (The audiobook is narrated by Kimberly Farr, as Alex Green, and Mark Bramhall, as Dr. Gantz, which I thought was a great choice.) “I was four years old when I first met a dragon. I didn’t tell my mother. I didn’t think she’d understand.”

I think this must be right around 1950. Alex grows up in small-town Wisconsin, in a pretty 1950s world: there are many things we just don’t talk about, including cancer, menstruation and most aspects of girlhood and womanhood, what to expect on one’s wedding night, diversity in sexual orientation and gender expression, our feelings, and dragons. When Alex is a little girl, her mother goes away for some time – months – and no one explains or even acknowledges the change; likewise when her mother returns, gaunt, weak, different (she doesn’t even smell right). The reader understands better than little-girl Alex when her mother’s chest is glimpsed, missing breasts, two scars like smiles. This world is recognizably our own except for the dragons. Women in this world can dragon (that’s a verb), or become dragons, at which point they sometimes eat their husbands (this seems to happen frequently with very unlikeable, not to say abusive, husbands) before flying away. Dragoning is a poorly understood phenomenon because, as with much that is female or feminine, society judges it too shameful to examine, and science mostly averts its gaze. Dr. Gantz is a rare exception: he believes in the scientific mandate to learn, whatever truths are revealed. Biology should never be shameful. His research articles and responses to an oppressive world are useful seasonings to this story, and he is himself a delightful character, alongside the heroic librarian Mrs. Gyzinska.

And oh, Alex’s auntie Marla, a wonderful woman who comes and cares for her while her mother is away in cancer treatment, a big powerful woman who flies airplanes during the war and works as a car mechanic and wears men’s clothes and takes very little shit, and who we lose to the Mass Dragoning of 1955. When Marla dragons, she leaves behind an infant daughter, Alex’s cousin Beatrice, who from here on is raised as Alex’s sister. Such is the gaslighting of Alex’s family and world that she learns to really believe – almost – that she has no aunt, that Beatrice has always been her sister. (Echoes of 1984. We have always been at war with Eastasia.) And boy, the time Alex has raising her younger sister, Beatrice, a delightful dragon of a child if there ever was one.

Despite all I’ve just thrown at you, I’ve barely scraped the surface of this remarkable novel. It contains many stories and many layers, much that is very recognizable from our ‘real’ world, and lots of potential metaphors to ponder. I wondered at different times if dragoning were a metaphor for menstruation; for puberty; for “un-american activities” (certainly, HUAC seems to conflate them); for simply being independent, self-determining, and female (except that those who dragon are overwhelmingly but not universally girls and women). This story tackles the way we handle difference, and especially gender, sexuality, and gender expression. It contains such maddening (if entirely realistic) renderings of sexism that it was sometimes hard to listen to. It contains transcendent moments of personal discovery, joyful academic inquiry, love and coming-of-age, and some lovely iterations of family and built family, which I always appreciate. “Sometimes,” confides Alex at an advanced age, “the expansive nature of family takes my breath away.” There is such good fun; I especially liked the line “If that dragon was hoping for sympathy, she was crying in front of the wrong teenager,” which I got to share with my favorite dragon-loving teenager. It considers the looping of time and relationships. It’s got science and wonder, a bit like A Tale for the Time Being, but I liked this better. I’m a bit over the moon about it, and am giving it a perfect score. Also, I loved the audio format, with the one caveat that I wish I could pull more quotations that I loved.

Do give it a go, and let me know what you think.

Rating: 10 military-issued boots.

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A Marvellous Light by Freya Marske

Posted on December 8, 2025 by pagesofjulia

Billed as historical fantasy, with a strong thread of queer romance, this was an absolutely delightful and fun read – not always joyful in the moment-to-moment struggles of its protagonists (whom I loved), but ultimately deeply satisfying. There was romance (and sex), intrigue and angst, wonderful humor, and a complex magical world. I’m excited for book two, and beyond.

We first meet Reginald Gatling in his final moments, and witness his torture and death by magical means at the hands of assailants unknown. They want to know where something is, and all they get from him, past a secret-binding spell, is the location: his office. In the next chapter, we meet Sir Robert (Robin) Blyth, who is irritated and mystified by his new job replacing the missing Reggie – in Reggie’s office. (Here we also meet the indomitable Miss Morrissey, assistant to Reggie and now Robin. As both a woman and a person of Indian descent, she is exceedingly rare in British civil service, and will prove to be one of the most capable, awesome, and entertaining characters in this story, although a relatively minor one.) And in bursts Edwin Courcey, who had been Reggie’s special liaison and is now to be Robin’s, although they do not get off to a good start. For one thing, Robin has no idea what his job is supposed to be.

What quickly follows is Robin’s “unbusheling,” which is what the magical world calls it when a nonmagical person is let in on the big secret that magic does in fact exist. Turns out that in Britain’s already heavily stratified society, there is a yet another distinction between magical and nonmagical families, and even the former can have the odd, unfortunate nonmagical individual – like Miss Morrissey, whose sister is a very capable magician. And then there is Edwin, who comes from a powerful, wealthy, magical family, but is the bullied younger son, and though an enormously accomplished academic student of magic, has vanishingly little power of his own. Robin is an athlete, a jock, not a scholar, and though he has a title, his estate is nearly bankrupt, and he has a much-beloved younger sister to care for on his civil servant’s salary. Add to all of this the mystery of the missing Reggie, a curse soon (and violently) set upon the freshly unbusheled Robin, Edwin’s own family traumas, and an enigmatic threat to the magical world as we know it – indeed, maybe the world overall – and Edwin and Robin may need to figure out how to get along with each other even if it does not come naturally.

Phew. I’ll stop here, with much left unsaid. This was a completely absorbing, page-turning adventure, and when we finally got to the sex-and-romance (after a long slow burn) it was a great relief. (Fully realized sexual content, if that’s a concern.) This magical world and its rules are complex, even sometimes a bit overwhelming – but that’s Robin’s experience too, so we’re just wrestling with it all by his side, and will probably survive as he does.

This book is pretty heavily male, but I cannot understate the value of Miss Morrissey, who may not have magic but outdoes all the powerful men who surround her in cleverness and the ability to get things done, including some scathing (and hilarious) observations about gender in society. I would follow Miss Morrissey anywhere. Book two does promise to be centered on women, although (from a glance) unfortunately not Miss Morrissey. I’m still 100% in.

Rating: 9 swans.

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Cape Fever by Nadia Davids

Posted on November 17, 2025 by pagesofjulia

A lonely colonial woman offers to write letters to the fiancé of her maid and the two become disturbingly intertwined in this evocative gothic tale of race, class, and spirits.

“I come highly recommended to Mrs. Hattingh through sentences I tell her I cannot read.” South African novelist Nadia Davids’s twisting gothic drama Cape Fever, her U.S. debut, opens by highlighting narrator Soraya’s ability to read, which she keeps from her employer. Soraya goes to work for the settler Mrs. Hattingh in 1920: hired as a combined cleaner and cook, the younger woman understands that the elder is not as wealthy as she wishes to appear. In the colonial city in which Mrs. Hattingh reigns over a large, lonely home, Soraya’s close-knit, loving family lives in the nearby Muslim quarter; Soraya is permitted by her employer to visit only rarely. Her father is an artist in religious calligraphy, creating beautiful works of prayer and devotion. The word “proclaim,” he instructs her, is “also read, recite. You see? For us, to read, to recite, is one,” and “The person is a pen. The person is paper.” Soraya’s fiancé, Nour, is an accomplished scholar who works on a farm while saving for teachers’ college.

There are moments in which Soraya feels something like fellowship with her employer, when she intuits that “every woman, rich or poor, madam or maid, dreams of escape.” But working for and living with Mrs. Hattingh, under power structures bigger than the individual, is deeply unpleasant. “She’s never understood the scale of what she wants and asks for.” Soraya retreats, in her small room, into the stories and characters that have come to her all her life: the Gray Women, as she terms the spirits that she alone can see; a seawoman with ink for blood; a woman who makes a baby out of soap. She finds Mrs. Hattingh’s house is teeming with spirits.

Mrs. Hattingh introduces a new comfort and stressor when she offers to write to Nour on Soraya’s behalf. As one woman takes the voice of the other–and intercepts the correspondence that arrives in return–their identities blur in disturbing ways. Soraya holds what she can of her own life in private and cherishes her visits to her family’s home, until even these are forbidden. In the increasingly claustrophobic manor, the tension between the two women builds, resulting in complex layers of psychological intrigue amid themes of class, race, love, grief, and haunting. In Soraya’s compelling voice, Davids blends mysticism, quiet power and resistance, and pain born of a long stretch of history in this unsettling tale of suspense. Cape Fever is beautiful, discomfiting, and moving.

This review originally ran as a *starred review* in the October 28, 2025 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 7 pickled lemons.

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The Midnight Bargain by C. L. Polk

Posted on November 10, 2025 by pagesofjulia

As much as I loved the Kingston Cycle, it’s tempting to say this is my favorite Polk yet. I am really digging the combination of historical setting (including lots of lush clothing detail – not really my area but it’s surprising, richly enjoyable in Polk’s capable writing hands), romance and strong feeling, with a fantasy / speculative framing but around very approachable values. This author has mastered that combination, and it is extremely satisfying to this reader.

In this case, please meet Beatrice Clayborn, the elder daughter of a banker father who has squandered the family’s wealth, and a magician mother who has been collared, literally, so that she cannot practice magic. This is the cost of marriage for female practitioners in the culture Beatrice has been born into. Men have the opportunity to study and improve their practice; women are bound. Beatrice chafes at this rule; she has been practicing her magic in secret, searching for the coded grimoire that will allow her to become a mage. If she succeeds, she will make herself unmarriageable, thereby disappointing her father, but she will also be able to help him improve the family’s financial situation. If she fails, she will be married off to a man of her father’s choosing, collared, denied her true self. We are introduced to Beatrice on the cusp of the bargaining season: she is being presented to high society as an ingenue (read debutante), for the purpose of attracting a suitor (preferably several) and eventually an advantageous marital match.

Bargaining season involves all the primping (clothes! and maquillage), dancing, preening, and social chess you can possibly imagine. It is profoundly not Beatrice’s scene; but it is very much Harriet’s. Harriet is Beatrice’s younger sister, and although she can be a little hard on Beatrice’s nerves, she is also one of the elder sister’s greatest concerns. Beatrice knows that if she fails at bargaining season – if she reveals herself as a “difficult woman,” undesirable, fails to make a match – she will cost Harriet her own chance at the same. Harriet is actually good at these games, and likes them, and deserves her own shot. Beatrice needs to become a mage and prevent her own marriage – but not appear to fail at the social game. It’s complicated.

So she’s struggling to be attractive but not too attractive, and never objectionable (even when the most objectionable men are thrown at her, and even when they are unspeakably rude), and meanwhile she’s struggling to train herself to a very high level of magical performance – and she’s made a new enemy, who might be becoming a friend, and whose brother is interesting. Powerful, wealthy, gorgeous, a capable magician – and he shows a surprising capacity to listen to Beatrice’s opinions on women’s rights. But if Beatrice marries, even for love, even to a man of her own choosing, she will lose her magic forever. She might just wind up facing a lose/lose set of options. But what if there were another way?

I appreciate that Polk’s alt-historical setting feels accurate and real, and the issues at stake – women’s rights, mostly – are both modern and at home in her setting. (Feminism is not new, is it, nor the need.) And I guess part of the reason I find all those period-clothing details so interesting is that they are, in fact, about class and gender and those bargaining season politics. And maybe it’s just a little bit fun to read about the frills and lace and stomachers and fichus and other things I had to look up – I have no time for it in my real life, but part of the fun of reading is to experience other lives, isn’t it? At any rate. This novel was fun and wrenching and powerful and just absorbing, and I would read another twenty-five of them by this author; I hope they are writing furiously and keep doing it for a long time. What’s next??

Rating: 9 picnic baskets.

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Clash of Steel: A Treasure Island Remix by C. B. Lee

Posted on October 31, 2025 by pagesofjulia

I think this is my favorite of the remix series. Clash of Steel follows Treasure Island perhaps a bit less closely than some, but the broad strokes are there. I love the way that C. B. Lee has adopted their own personal history, and really substantive research into world history, to reset Stevenson’s classic tale of adventure, pirates, hidden treasure, family, loyalty and betrayal (etc.) in the South China Sea in piracy’s golden age. In this process, they offer protagonists who are girls and women, queer, and Chinese and Vietnamese. None of this is cut to fit Stevenson’s story; it’s a riff, set to history, in a time and place where it fits naturally. I loved the whole story. I also loved the supplemental materials at the back of the book, but let’s go in order.

We begin with a prologue set in 1818 South China Sea in which we meet an eight-year-old girl named Anh, aboard a small fishing vessel with her mother (the captain), her little brother, and a small crew. We get a glimpse of dangers at sea, a tight-knit family group, a daring young girl, and an interest in tales of hidden pirates’ treasures. Then we fast-forward to 1826, a small village in China’s Guangdong province. Sixteen-year-old Xiang has never left her village, not for lack of desire. Her father is long dead at sea; her mother is a successful salt merchant and proprietor of several teahouses, including the one where Xiang lives in this backwater, locked away, kept ‘safe’ but unhappy. She dwells in the stories she reads of travel and adventure, and on the high point from where she can view the city of Canton, and dream.

An opportunity comes when she convinces her mother to take her to the city, to visit the larger teahouse there, to see the commercial center–Mother wishes to marry her off to a young man from an appropriate family, but Xiang intends to show enough prowess that she might be permitted to run the teahouse someday. She has always yearned for her mother’s approval, which has never come. If only she could prove herself worthy, she might win that approbation as well as a chance to have a wider life than the village can ever afford. In her brief hours in the city, she meets a magnetic girl her own age–Anh–and gets a snatch of an idea of the kind of life that might be possible: adventure, gumption, authenticity, more. Then a series of events forces her hand. Faced with being shipped peremptorily back to the village forevermore, Xiang takes a chance and runs away. See Xiang on a fishing ship that is also a trade vessel that is also a smuggling ship; see her learn to sail and fend for herself; see her forming closer relationships than she’s ever had before. For a time, it seems all sorts of things might be within reach: family, love, riches, independence. Or violent death and the end of everything she thought she knew about her own background.

Xiang’s story calls on Lee’s own history (descended from Vietnamese refugees of the fall of Saigon, with Chinese roots “tangled together in past generations in conflict and trauma,” and yes, with pirates appearing in that story as well) and the documented history of Zheng Yi Sao, a “pirate queen” who commanded over 70,000 pirates and over 1,200 vessels. I was so pleased by not only the author’s note and acknowledgments, but also language notes, pronunciation guide, and extended historical notes. Finally, we were gifted with an alternate prologue, which (I agree with Lee’s editor) would have revealed too much of the plot if it had appeared at the beginning of the book; but coming where it did, offers intriguing character insight. I wonder if it might have made sense as a sort of flashback late in the story. At any rate, all this extra material enriched my experience of this story, and I loved having the extended historical notes in particular, because I knew nothing of this era of world history in which a Chinese and Vietnamese empire of pirates controlled the South China Sea and subdued all Chinese, British, and Portuguese naval efforts. Thrilling! Oh, and the normalcy of same-sex relationships in this time and place setting, which was apparently disrupted only by Western influence during the Qing dynasty. These references to history make the imaginative adventure tale all the more engaging, at least for this reader.

This story was captivating, and I loved having enough background to appreciate it on several levels. I’ll be looking out for C. B. Lee and am definitely in for more remixed classics.

Rating: 8 baos.

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