The Night Ship

February 1, 2022

Chiaverini's Switchboard Soldiers chronicles the women of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, who weren't even eligible to enlist in the army but helped facilitate communication on the battlefield as bombs fell around them and pandemic raged during World War I (150,000-copy first printing). French Resistance fighter Elise and German soldier Sebastian fall in love in Occupied Paris and face moral crisis at war's end in Druart's The Last Hours in Paris (45,000-copy first printing). In Kidd's The Night Ship, sad-eyed young Gil is sent to live with his grandfather in a Western Australian fishing community and learns about the 1629 sinking of a ship whose passengers included the newly orphaned Mayken, sailing to what was then the Dutch East Indies (75,000-copy first printing). In Martin's latest, Ava is The Librarian Spy, working undercover in World War II Lisbon to collect intelligence and finding connection through coded messages with Elaine, apprenticed at a press run by the Resistance in Occupied France (150,000-copy first printing). Lock continues his successful "American Novels" series with Voices in the Dead House, which braids together the experiences of Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott in Civil War-torn Washington, DC. In Sister Mother Warrior, celebrated Island Queen author Riley conveys the Haitian Revolution through the stories of two women: Marie-Claire Bonheur, the first empress of Haiti, and West African-born warrior Gran Toya (100,000-copy first printing).

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August 22, 2022
Kidd (Things in Jars) unfurls parallel narratives of two nine-year-old children in her intriguing latest, based on a historical shipwreck. In 1628, after the mother of a girl named Mayken dies, she sails from Holland to the Dutch East Indies with her nursemaid to join her merchant father. Mayken’s precocious nature leads her to explore the ship, called the Batavia. While dressed as a boy in order to pass unnoticed, Mayken searches deep into the Batavia for a monster that crew members claim lives there. In 1989, a boy named Gil goes to live on Beacon Island in Australia after his mother’s death. Gil now lives with his fisherman grandfather, Joss Hurley. This is where the Batavia sank, and an excavation of the wreck is now underway. Gil is intrigued by the project and by the rumor that a ghost still haunts the island. Meanwhile, a feud escalates between Joss and Roper, another fisherman, that started years ago when Roper’s uncle drowned at sea. Kidd effortlessly navigates between the two time periods, highlighting the similarities between Mayken’s and Gil’s lives and the increasing dangers they face. Readers will be swept up in this fast-paced narrative. Agent: Amelia Atlas, ICM Partners.

September 1, 2022
The 1629 maritime disaster of the Dutch East India flagship Batavia has been fictionalized before, as in Arabella Edge's The Company (2001), but Kidd's (Things in Jars, 2020) approach is especially innovative. She imagines the voyage and terrible aftermath from the viewpoint of nine-year-old Mayken, who leaves the Netherlands with her nursemaid to join her father across the globe. A parallel story depicts Gil, also nine, who comes to stay with his cantankerous fisherman grandfather on Beacon Island off Australia's west coast, the site of the Batavia shipwreck, in 1989. Both children are inquisitive, motherless misfits with active imaginations. While Mayken explores the lower decks in male disguise, worried about a reported monster, Gil's presence inflames an ongoing feud with another family. Tension runs high in both tales, which are closely interwoven. There are whimsical, even funny moments, but physical and psychological horrors flourish in this well-researched, spellbindingly dark and folklore-infused novel as the plot advances. As one character opines, "The greatest shame of humankind is the failure of the strong to protect the weak." Recommended especially to Alma Katsu's fans.

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Starred review from September 1, 2022
The lives of two 9-year-olds--one in 1628 and the other in 1989--intersect across time in this moving examination of the real-life wreck of the Batavia. Mayken sets sail from Haarlem with her nursemaid, Imke, to join a father she's never met following her mother's untimely death. The ship they book passage on is loaded with riches and named for their destination: Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. Lonely and precocious, Mayken quickly becomes fascinated by the parts of the ship hidden from rich passengers, which she dubs "the Below World." She begins a secret, second life as the cabin boy Obbe, befriending a soldier, a sailor, a kitchen boy, and the ship's barber-surgeon while trying to hunt down the eel-like monster Bullebak, whom she believes is making Imke sick. Almost four centuries later, the newly orphaned Gil moves to Beacon Island, the fishing community off the coast of Australia where his grandfather Joss lives and the archaeological site of the Batavia shipwreck. Gil's unusual upbringing has left him alienated from his peers, but, like Mayken, his kindness slowly earns him adult friends and protectors, and his curiosity drives him to uncover the island's secrets. Kidd shows a keen understanding of how thin the boundary between the magic and the mundane is for children and treats their understanding of the world with seriousness and compassion. Her prose has an arresting simplicity that evokes fairy tales, and the echoes between Mayken's and Gil's experiences are treats for the reader to discover. An ambitious, melancholy work of historical fiction that offers two wondrous young protagonists for the price of one.

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