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book review, Boston, Cambridge, capital punishment, dual timelines, eighteenth century, female pirate, feminism, historical fiction, Katherine Howe, literary fiction, page-turner, physical detail, pirates, treachery, treasure, twentieth century, violence
Review: A True Account, by Katherine Howe
Holt, 2023. 268 pp. $29
One blistering Boston day in June 1726, Hannah Masury attends a hanging of three pirates, whose sendoff is ministered to by no less a personage than Cotton Mather. Having played hooky from a wharfside inn where she toils for pennies, that night she decides to bed down in the barn, where she finds a boy, desperate and terrified, demanding a bite to eat.
Against her better judgment, Hannah leads him to the inn kitchen; two men pursue them. Hannah evades them, but they cut the boy’s head off with a machete and hunt her too. Knowing that he signed on as a cabin boy on a certain ship, Hannah makes a snap decision. She chops off her hair, takes his boots and clothes, and visits the ship, intending to take his place.
However, the ship’s master is Ned Low, an infamous pirate, a mercurial man who knows no restraint or mercy:
Near as I could fathom, Ned Low was actually many men imprisoned in one compact sailor’s body, with never a sign of which one might be shown to the world at any given moment. He was one minute laughing and swallowing Madeira in his open mouth, spraying it in the air like a mermaid, and the next cracking one of my shipmates across the jaw for laughing too loudly. . . .
In choosing to join Low’s search for booty, to which everyone aboard is sworn upon pain of death, she’s taken a tremendous risk. They might strike it rich—for a time, until capture and punishment bring them down. But Hannah faces a closer threat, for the moment Low finds out who she is might be her last. One day, she learns what it means to sail in the eye of a storm, amid a pocket of calm while everywhere else is chaos. What a metaphor for her predicament.
A century later, Radcliffe Professor Marian Beresford wants to throw Kay Lonergan out of her office. Kay, an undergraduate who seems to have neither ability nor strong character, is pressing an antique book on Marian, allegedly a fragment of Hannah’s memoirs. Marian, having never heard of Hannah and alert to other details, suspects that Kay has swallowed a hoax.
However, as a sharp-eyed historian, Marian has noticed intriguing facts about the fragment that prompt a second look. And since her father is a big wheel at the Explorers Club, with the money to finance an expedition. . . . you can guess what happens next.
Usually, I find the trope of The Manuscript and the Researcher insipid fare, especially with the earnestness that so often sugars it. But something about A True Account compelled me to read it, and I’m glad I did.
First, you can guess only part of what happens next, and Howe twists her narrative with skill and a keen eye for human foibles. Nobody’s too good here. Little is as it seems, and Marian quickly discovers that her bland student knows a few tricks. Also, our professor has no excitement in her tweedy life, so she’s glad to do something that promises thrills, might even be daring—though she suffers guilt about them, fearing humiliation every other second. Her biography might be titled Of No Account—or so her famous father treats her, and so she believes, deep down.
Meanwhile, Hannah’s life as a pirate is as gripping as it gets. Not only does she have to remain constantly vigilant, the violence of the life she’s chosen forces her to think about who she is at heart. At the inn, she led a hard life, but at sea the perennial threat of bloodshed raises the stakes, even as the promise of wealth beyond her dreams drives her onward.
A woman of her time had no way to earn such a fortune. Howe wishes to show that a pirate crew had more liberty and potential than any landlubber—circumscribed by the threat of hanging from a yardarm, to be sure.
Both narratives benefit from Howe’s prose, which zips along like a ship under full sail, running before the wind. I admire how she introduces physical detail, which permeates the narrative. Hannah’s amazement at the nature the city girl has never seen provides a clever contrast to Marian’s frustration with just about any physical circumstance outside Cambridge. Be warned that the pirate scenes are grisly, though the violence never feels gratuitous or sensational.
My only complaint, admittedly minor, is the intended feminist parallel between Hannah and Marian. Each has her struggles, yes, but the risks one character takes to assert herself far outshine the other’s and lie in a very different realm, despite what it says on the jacket flap.
Even so, Marian too has a trick up her sleeve, and just when you think you can predict the ending, guess again.
I highly recommend A True Account.
Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.