A female protagonist, who works in areas commonly associated with male characters, fishing the high seas, mending boats, highway robbery. This could be interesting?
For me it didn’t capture my reading desires, there were inconsistencies and the strong female lead cake across a little weak and not so believable.
I liked the strong feminist side of the lead character, she was willing to fight her corner, that is until a dominant male character Mr Black comes along and tells her what to do.
She was capable of fixing a boat and did fishing, and yet the knife she carried was blunt and unsuited to defending her, why would she not simply sharpen it on an oiled or wet rock? Especially when she got into the robbery game.
Speaking of robbing, after getting accidentally involved with a robbery, she put her blunt knife to a lads throat and took his jacket. And yet when that Mr Black came along and said “give me most of your earnings, your working for me”, she replied “yes of course” and then did as the man said like a sheep. This mix of ruthless and meek behaviour made me question who this person was and what they stood for, it just doesn’t seem realistic.
Being set in Cornwall, there is a lot of description of the sea, which should have been excellent. This was the weakest part of the writers descriptive skill. Salt monsters sounds like Honey Monsters evil twin, not a huge rogue wave. Grinding up a wave? Sounds sexual or a builder using a grinder on water. A saltwater hill, also didn’t work, doesn’t capture the motion of the ever changing tumultuous sea surface. I can see that the author was trying out unique descriptive sentences, and it is original, but I found it floundered the text as I was trying to figure out what facet of the sea the author was trying to describe.
There was some authenticity in the Cornish names used in the characters and places, Trelawney etc, and I liked the references to popular hanging sites such as Exeter, she would have got extra points for mentioning Heavitree. But I didn’t feel like the story was uniquely in Cornwall, other than these aspects and using “my lover” once.
It’s may be worth a read, especially to see if she finally sharpens that knife, but it’s too rough around the edges and I would have liked the female lead to have been stronger and stood up for herself more, or been weaker and then became stronger rather than splitting between the two personalities. For me, it’s a no.
For me it didn’t capture my reading desires, there were inconsistencies and the strong female lead cake across a little weak and not so believable.
I liked the strong feminist side of the lead character, she was willing to fight her corner, that is until a dominant male character Mr Black comes along and tells her what to do.
She was capable of fixing a boat and did fishing, and yet the knife she carried was blunt and unsuited to defending her, why would she not simply sharpen it on an oiled or wet rock? Especially when she got into the robbery game.
Speaking of robbing, after getting accidentally involved with a robbery, she put her blunt knife to a lads throat and took his jacket. And yet when that Mr Black came along and said “give me most of your earnings, your working for me”, she replied “yes of course” and then did as the man said like a sheep. This mix of ruthless and meek behaviour made me question who this person was and what they stood for, it just doesn’t seem realistic.
Being set in Cornwall, there is a lot of description of the sea, which should have been excellent. This was the weakest part of the writers descriptive skill. Salt monsters sounds like Honey Monsters evil twin, not a huge rogue wave. Grinding up a wave? Sounds sexual or a builder using a grinder on water. A saltwater hill, also didn’t work, doesn’t capture the motion of the ever changing tumultuous sea surface. I can see that the author was trying out unique descriptive sentences, and it is original, but I found it floundered the text as I was trying to figure out what facet of the sea the author was trying to describe.
There was some authenticity in the Cornish names used in the characters and places, Trelawney etc, and I liked the references to popular hanging sites such as Exeter, she would have got extra points for mentioning Heavitree. But I didn’t feel like the story was uniquely in Cornwall, other than these aspects and using “my lover” once.
It’s may be worth a read, especially to see if she finally sharpens that knife, but it’s too rough around the edges and I would have liked the female lead to have been stronger and stood up for herself more, or been weaker and then became stronger rather than splitting between the two personalities. For me, it’s a no.