Cabin Girl

Series: The Secretive Seas, Standalone

Author: E.G. Bella

Genre: Historical Fiction

Release Date: Sept 18th, 2023

Book Description:

Eight years ago, young Éirinn O’Connell’s papa disappeared at sea.

Many sleepless nights later, in the rolling hills of 1600’s Ireland, Éirinn has given up on his return – while her mama continues to watch the horizon, her grasp of reality slipping. Desperate to provide for her and her sister, Éirinn learns all she can of medicine and spends her days struggling to assist villagers who shun her for her crooked back.

Then in one brutal night, Barbary pirates raid her village, and Éirinn is dragged from her family and the only home she’s ever known.

Set on a course to Morocco, and amidst a crew as turbulent as the ocean around her, Éirinn is forced to tend to the sick quartermaster. In addition, she must serve as cabin girl to the infamous Captain Gills, a hard-hearted man bent on thwarting her every attempt to return home…to the family she prays still lives.

As Éirinn searches for a way home, she soon finds that all is not what it seems aboard The Lonely Eye. Unrest brews and mutiny whispers. Allies appear in unexpected places. A cunning enemy plots. Who can she trust? Will her God carry her through the storms? And how can she survive the Captain’s constant torment?

The answers are unlike anything she expects.

Review:

Right from the start, Éirinn is an engaging and sympathetic main character. Her struggles and her personality are both vivid, and I enjoyed reading about her. She’s struggling to take care of her sick mother and her little sister, she wants to be a healer but has limited success, and feels really bad about it. In part, because if she can’t do better, how will she ever find a way to heal her mother? She disguises herself as a boy, and that’s why the pirates kidnap her.

Éirinn has her overwhelming fears and her physical disabilities, she has plenty of distinguishing personality, she has guts. In general, I really enjoyed her, and she is a strong, true female character.

Many of the other characters don’t have a whole lot of space and time in order to reach the level of reality that Éirinn, in whose head we spend the whole book does, but those you get to know are not flat. I especially found that Captain Gills, as you get to know him, is also a unique character with a vibrant personality and depth to him. I thought the complexities one finds in him were human – I don’t know if they made sense, but they felt human.

I will say I don’t find the Éirinn on the pirate ship quite as relateable all the time as I found Éirinn in her home village, dealing with the people around her, and her family. There are moments well into the book, where for whatever reason I just didn’t feel her, and a few where I wondered what in the world she was thinking.

For those who like them, the story has a couple of very dramatic twists and turns, even a plot twist or two, and a bit of a mystery. I, personally, found the plot twists – and Éirinn’s naievety – somewhat overdone, but that could just be that I don’t care for the sort of plot twists that come singing at you out of nowhere in the way this one does. Certainly, someone might believe anything she can, if she feels like so doing offers her even the imagination of the slimmest chance of returning home, and that could explain a lot of it, though I don’t think that explanation works for everything.

As the book came to its conclusion, however, I felt like both Éirinn’s choices and flaws, and other parts of the story as well, were constrained in a bottle that was designed to produce a particular conclusion, instead of organically developing into it. While the book is not preachy (Éirinn prays constantly, but this is a realistic representation of some human beings, not preachiness) the conclusion itself feels forced in order to produce certain Christian points or themes, or whatever you call them. Perhaps, this is part of why I found Éirinn less personable. It’s not horribly done, just … kind of forced.

This brings me to another point: I’m far from an expert on the culture of this place and time-period. In fact, I know very little about it, as the dates matter a fair amount, and I tend to get what situation was when rather mixed up. I’m not even sure how precisely the book anchors its time-period. So I’m not sure how realistic some of the cultural elements are: is Éirinn’s Christianity and her terminology and theology what one might expect from someone living in a village on the shores of Ireland, or is it imposed by the author’s modern Christianity on the story? I simply don’t know well enough to say definitively, and I can speak even less to the other elements of the story.

I can, however, say that the description of the pirates “society” and their ship was vivid and detailed – not full of meaningless details that distracted from the present scenes, but the sort of detailed that sets the scene well.

E.G. Website