In Lark, Sally Watson took readers down a most interesting path and gave us a delightfully fun adventure. There are some aspects of the story that parents may wish to be aware of, which I note in my review, but overall, it was an entertaining escapade well-suited to teen readers. As much as I wanted to follow the family tree, I decided to read Jade next, as it is also available at Audible (recorded via Virtual Voice).
My spoiler-free review is very short: I did enjoy it. I will have it in my library. But, I will be cautious about to whom I recommend it. It is about a strong female protagonist from Colonial Virginia whose family is in the slave trade. Through a series of events, Melanie (nicknamed Jade) finds herself on a ship in the Bahamas attacked by pirates, and she joins their forces. She becomes a notorious outlaw, and this story is a rollicking fun ride. As much fun as this novel is, I found a number of challenges that mar the overall story for me, and I think parents may wish to know about some hefty content.
The rest of this review will contain a fair number of spoilers with a lot of quotes. I hope to let Sally Watson tell you for herself what she was doing in this story. You then can decide for yourself how to handle this with your readers.
“You can’t possibly be serious, Melanie! It’s utterly idiotic to make such a comparison! They’re black! They have nothing whatever in common with us. They’re savages, animals, without human sensibilities. And they’re far better off here being cared for in a civilized country than they would be in the jungles of Africa” (page 3).
Jade was the daughter of a wealthy American Colonial merchant whose family’s trade included the transportation and sale of slaves. We find out in the first chapter that her grandparents were nothing like her parents, but they have died, so feminist and abolitionist Jade is forced to hide a part of herself from her family, all the while fighting openly and embarrassingly against them in public. Her defiance and her unwillingness to conform to Colonial culture forces her parents to send her to the family plantation in Jamaica where they hope that her aunt and uncle can reform her. Jamaica, however, is at the heart of the slave trade, and it is here that Melanie (her actual name) is at her worst.
“Her father’s long suffering temper was rising again, and she was saved from another whipping on the spot only by the fact that he didn’t feel up to it again so soon. ‘You’re a willful and insolent girl in the Colony of Virginia, and English law says that you shall obey your father until you marry, and after that your husband.’
‘He’ll be sorry,’ threatened Jade, tight-smiled. They glared at each other for a moment with identical eyes and his hand tightened painfully on her shoulder. Then he controlled himself with a visible effort and let go.
‘You’d take another whipping right now rather than give in, ‘wouldn’t you?’ he discovered, wonderingly.
‘Yes,’ said Jade simply, and went upstairs, victorious.” (p.7)
In Jamaica, Melanie’s uncle and father take her into town to meet with a slave seller who has some “very special slaves” reserved for them to look over. Before they enter the courtyard, the men ask the slaver to clothe the slaves before Melanie sees them. “Himmel, next you will want us to clothe the pigs and cows before she is allowed to see them.” When Jade sees the slaves, she is afraid of becoming ill. Her father turns to her and glances “sideways at his stone-faced daughter, wishing he hadn’t let her come. ‘They don’t really mind, you know . . . no more than horses do. They’re only Blacks’” (pg. 60).
“And then she saw the girl, standing with four other women, but infinitely aloof, dwarfing them in size and spirit. She held herself like a queen: ignoring chains, ragged shift, her own bare satin flesh, and everyone in the courtyard. Her face was swollen from a blow – but beneath the swelling was great beauty. A slender black column of throat rose proudly to meet the curve of a long delicate jaw; the head was beautifully shaped; and between high cheekbones and a strong lovely arch of brow were clear intelligent eyes – eyes like William’s fox: proud and angry and unyielding. Except for those eyes, the face was a mask of composed indifference” (p. 61).
When Jade sees Domino, “she stood transfixed, her own eyes wide with shocked recognition. She knew that look! It was her very own after-a-whipping expression, and for a moment she had the dizzy sensation of meeting herself in someone else’s skin. . . . Suddenly she was sharing the searing humiliation of being discussed and marketed like a farm animal . . . the savage desire to kill her captors, or foil them by killing herself . . . and the pride that kept her calm as a statue because the final degradation would be to show that she cared. . . .” (p. 61).
Melanie insists on buying this slave so she can free her. Her father is worried that Domino will be unbreakable, violent, and impossible to train. He is also afraid that Jade will free her at the first opportunity. Out of necessity to save this beautiful and intelligent black woman, Jade degrades herself by doing something she never does: she begs her father for this present. And then, surprisingly, her uncle suggests that it is a good idea. He insists that he can keep Melanie safe, and that it will be a good lesson for her. He also insists that she will very likely fail, for “this kind of slave is stubborn and often dies out of spite. Jade refrained from saying that she didn’t blame them.”
Jade’s father does purchase Domino. And, despite a rocky start, Jade and Domino become fast friends. Life on the plantation, however, is suffocating for Jade. Her aunt requires her to wear miserable stays (like a corset) and she refuses. Her aunt does not have the gumption to fight her willful niece. Instead, Uncle Augustus demands that Jade obey. When she continues to refuse, he disciplines her harshly with a riding crop and locks her in her room until she is willing to be compliant. One night, Jade realizes that the way her uncle could actually win is to beat Domino or Jade’s other slave Joshua. So “Jade, constrained to unwilling prudence by her fears for Joshua and Domino, agreed to wear stays with tight-waisted gowns and in public . . . In consequence, she went around with an air of a leashed demon that made everyone uneasy” (p.89).
At about midway through this story, Jade finds herself on a ship headed home. When the ship is caught in a storm, they head for a harbor on a nearby island. When night falls, and the deck is mostly unmanned, Jade sneaks into the belly of the ship and sets all of the cargo (slaves) free. She is caught and wounded. She is beaten badly by the captain, and she is in very bad shape. While she is unconscious, the ship is attacked by pirates, and she finds herself in the custody of the dread pirate Anne Bonney and her crew.
Jade, her slaves, and many of the sailors from the merchant ship join the ranks of the notorious female pirate. And, for the first time in Jade and Domino’s lives, they find themselves truly free. Pirate life is complicated and nuanced. Jade is an excellent swordsman and a fierce pirate. She willingly will fight any slaver ship, but she will not participate in the attacks on Spanish gold ships. Her principles land her in a lot of trouble with some of the other pirates.
“There was no church for pirates, nor any minister conveniently aboard any of the Queen Royal’s prizes. So [hidden due to spoilers] were married in a solemn shipboard wedding: an outlaw wedding: sacred and binding – and altogether illegal as far as church and state were concerned. This worried [hidden], who was at heart a conventional young man” (p.178).
I think the romance in this book is quite chaste. That said, friends who have read this book are uncertain as to whether or not the couple above were intimately involved before the wedding. If they were, it was more or less hidden from the reader.
I hate to spoil, but I do think that parents may wish to know that Domino delights in scaring her opponents by telling them that she will use magic on them. “Towering above them both, she looked down, tapped Rafferty’s collarbone lightly with a long black finger, and purred at him in English that by now was almost as fluent as she chose it to be.”
“‘You saw me put ju-ju on Barton, yes? And what happen to Barton, hmm? Anyone who annoy my friends, I put ju-ju on him, too’” (p. 183).
When Domino gets married, “[hidden] and Domino married themselves, by the rituals of Domino’s old home, now wiped from the earth. There was something strangely exalting about it. Jade couldn’t imagine God taking offense because it was a pagan rite” (p. 194).
My thoughts:
Jade has the right ideas but, by her own admission, she goes to the rebellious extreme at all times. And this does not make her a great heroine. Instead, I find her to be a petulant teenage idealist who crashes through life without regard for anything other than her own will. Not only does this grate on my nerves, but it makes for a dull one-dimensional character. When pre-reading for teenagers, I am particularly concerned that she would encourage an extremist attitude in them as well.
And, here’s where I struggle with this book: the people and prejudices that Jade is raging against deserve her wrath and our scorn. The racism of her family is vile. The English laws regarding women as little more than property are equally vile. She is right to be outraged by these things. And so, I have a hard time objecting to her war against all of society.
I am, however, left reading this with a key question: what good will my readers find in this story?
They will find high-quality language. They will find a rightly ordered contempt for racism, slavery, and misogyny. They will even find an exciting story.
However, they will also find a story in which rebellious, discontented teenagers are rewarded for socially unacceptable behavior that includes a lust for adventure up to and including the killing of enemies.
I will end this review with one of my favorite quotes from Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins:
“It does seem to me that someone might write stories that should be lively, natural and helpful tales in which the English should be good, the morals pure, and the characters such as we can love in spite of the faults that all may have.”