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| Star-Crossed |
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| by Linda Collison |
Review by LeeLee
Patricia Kelly is a foolish and prideful young woman. She has her
share of courage, but not much else to her name. Life is full of choices which affect our future, and Patricia makes none
of the traditional choices of women of the Eighteenth Century. Following her dream, she boards a ship set for the West Indies
in order to claim her inheritance. On this journey, the lessons which will shape her as a woman begin. Along the way she meets
many new individuals, including those who help her, those who are indifferent to her plight, and those who mean her harm.
Patricia’s need to determine the course of her future will carry her on, even though her life’s fortune seems
to rise and fall with the waves in the sea.
This is a seafaring adventure of a sort I’ve never read before. The
author has a nice turn of words which sets the scene and the mood of the time. The reader can feel, smell and hear the ship
and those aboard. You want to know more about the many well drawn characters in the book; the Captain’s serene wife
Mary, the ship’s gentle surgeon MacPherson and the mother of Alexander Hamilton. Linda Collison lets you see the humanity
of even the crudest of men.
Star-Crossed captures the uncertainty of youth standing on the brink of adulthood.
As an historical novel, it is interesting and informative. I never knew about women aboard naval ships, and I am not new to
the seafaring genre. There is a fine glossary at the end with sailing terms for us landlubbers. Due to some of the subject
matter, I would recommend this book for older teens and adults, although the author handles the bawdiness of the sailor’s
lives with discretion and the intimate scenes with respect.
Question for the Author:
1. It is easy
to see, from reading this story, that you love sailing. Do you plan to write more adventures on the sea?
Right now I’m working on Books II and III of the Star-Crossed
Trilogy. And I’m also doing research and developing characters for a different sort of novel, set at sea in the
21st century.
You might say I have a conflicted relationship with deep water. I’m in love with it, challenged
by it, both soothed and agitated by it. When at sea I sometimes I get seasick and long for terra firma. I respect the ocean,
and I fear it! That all makes for a powerful setting.
2. I know you were inspired by the time you spent on
the Endeavour Replica to write this story. What made you choose this particular time and place in history to write about?
Being aboard the HM Bark Endeavour was the closest thing
to entering a time machine back to the 18th - century that I can imagine. The vessel is deemed one of the most accurate replica
ships in existence.
For three weeks we worked pretty much like 18th-century British sailors, living by the ship’s
bell, sleeping in hammocks we lashed to the deckheads, climbing the ratlines aloft to make sail, taking our turn at the helm,
braiding reef points and making tarred canvas buckets from scraps of old sails. We also had history lectures by author/historian
Victor Suthren, aboard as a supernumerary. Because I was so immersed in the setting, so captivated by it, I had to write about
it.
Europe’s so-called “Age of Enlightenment” intrigues me. The science, the exploration, the music,
literature, philosophy -- the salons where all these ideas were discussed. And while women were disenfranchised politically
and economically, they enjoyed more freedom in the 18th-century than they did in the following century, especially during
the repressive Victorian era.
3. I have read quite a few seafaring stories and histories, and though I knew of the
female pirates and Civil War soldiers, I had never read of women aboard naval ships. I notice that the books you list as sources
were published in the late nineteen-nineties. Why do you think this has not been more widely publicized?
I wonder that
myself! (Do I dare say it might diminish man’s perceived image of the heroic fighting seamen, acknowledging all the
women and children on board as well?) Of course, most women aboard weren’t cross-dressing sailors, but the wives of
the warrant officers. The ship was their rightful home, at least throughout the 18th century.
As far as the likelihood
of women passing as men and working as sailors, what I found out as I was climbing out on the main topgallant yard to furl
sail, or taking my turn at the wheel was this: If a woman my age could hold her own on the yardarm alongside the men, then
surely other younger women could. A sailor’s life is a hard one, but it provides room, board, and a paycheck. What’s
more, it offers adventure.
4. Your heroine, Patricia Kelly, has some daunting obstacles
to overcome in her life that were not of her own making, and some which were. What are some lessons you would hope that modern
women who face difficulties could take away with them from this story?
I’m glad you asked that. In writing Star-Crossed I
wanted to explore what it might have been like to have been a young woman in the 18th century, a time that didn’t know
the social safety nets, the civil rights we enjoy in the United States today. Yet we can never take things for granted or
become complacent. Freedoms can be eroded by the stroke of a pen, by changes in style and social custom.
At the beginning
of the story Patricia is a naïve, self-centered young woman faced with a huge problem: her own survival. Like all of us, her
strengths are her weaknesses too. She makes mistakes and misjudgments, but she learns from them.
Patricia refuses
to be victimized. She wrestles with her fate to change it. She’s impetuous, she makes mistakes, but she lives boldly,
and with passion.
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