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Set in a little seaside town in North Carolina during the waning many years of the American Revolution, this incandescent debut novel follows three years of family - fathers and daughters, mother and son, expert and slave, individuals who yearn for redemption amid a heady brew of conflict, kidnapping, slavery, and love. Attracted to the ocean, 10-year-old Tabitha wanders the marshes of her small seaside town and listens to her father's experiences about his pirate voyages and the mother she never realized. Since the loss of his partner, Helen, John has continued to be land-bound because of their daughter, however when Tab contracts yellowish fever, he becomes to the ocean once more. Needy to save his daughter, he takes her aboard a sloop bound for Bermuda, hoping the sodium air will mend her. Years before, Helen herself grew up by the widowed father. Asa, the devout owner of a little plantation, offers his daughter a slave known as Moll for her 10th birthday. Still left largely on their own, Helen and Moll create a close but uneasy companionship. Helen slowly but surely gets control the running of the plantation as girls grow up, however when she fits John, the pirate changed Continental soldier, she flouts convention and her father's wants by slipping in love. Moll, meanwhile, is pressured into relationship with a stranger. Her only solace is her kid, Davy, whom she'll protect with a love that defies the bounds of slavery. In this fashionable, evocative, and haunting debut, Katy Simpson Smith catches the singular love between mother or father and child, the devastation of love lost, and the unhappy pathways we travel in the name of renewal.
