The Pirate's Daughter
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By Margaret Cezair-Thompson
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1 review
THE PIRATE’S DAUGHTER by Margaret Cezair-Thompson is an unforgettable story of love and adventure, spanning three decades of Jamaican history.
Jamaica, 1946. Errol Flynn washes up on in the Zaca, his storm-wrecked yacht. Ida Joseph, the teenaged daughter of Port Antonio’s Justice of the Peace, is intrigued to learn that the ’World’s Handsomest Man’ is on the island, and makes it her business to meet him. For the jaded swashbuckler, Jamaica is a tropical paradise that Ida, unfazed by his celebrity, seems to share. Soon Flynn has made a home for himself on Navy Island, where he entertains the cream of Hollywood at parties that become a byword for decadence – and Ida has set her heart on marrying this charismatic older man who has singled her out for his attention. Flynn and Ida do not marry, but Ida bears Flynn a daughter, May, who will meet her father but once. The Pirate’s Daughter is a tale of passion and recklessness, of two generations of women and their battles for love and survival, and of a nation struggling to rise to the challenge of hard-won independence.
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We read this book the month after reading a traumatic one about gangs and murder - it was definitely more uplifting than that!
Cezair-Thompson knows how to craft a good tale, with a decent style and an undemanding tone. There were places where the book 'dragged' a little and points which seemed unrelated to the overall direction of the work, but the overall feeling of the group was that it was a nice enough read.
One of the biggest issues was that we couldn't understand why the author bothered to write fictional characters who were analogous to real people but also to include a fictionalised Errol Flynn whose life in the book contained a confusing mixture of events/people drawn from reality and others purely invented for the text.
