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Book Reviewed by:In 1946, a storm-wrecked boat carrying Hollywood’s most famous swashbuckler shored up on the coast of Jamaica, and the glamorous world of 1940’s Hollywood converged with that of a small West Indian society.
“Back in America, little was known of my life in Jamaica,” wrote Errol Flynn.
In 1946, a storm-wrecked boat carrying Hollywood’s most famous swashbuckler shored up on the coast of Jamaica, and the glamorous world of 1940’s Hollywood converged with that of a small West Indian society. After a long and storied career on the silver screen, Errol Flynn spent much of the last years of his life on a small island off of Jamaica, throwing parties and sleeping with increasingly younger teenaged girls. Based on those years, The Pirate’s Daughter is the story of Ida, a local girl who has an affair with Flynn that produces a daughter, May, who meets her father but once.
Spanning two generations of women whose destinies become inextricably linked with the matinee idol’s, this lively novel tells the provocative history of a vanished era, of uncommon kinships, compelling attachments, betrayal and atonement in a paradisal, tropical setting. As adept with Jamaican vernacular as she is at revealing the internal machinations of a fading and bloated matinee idol, Margaret Cezair-Thompson weaves a saga of a mother and daughter finding their way in a nation struggling to rise to the challenge of independence.
Inspired by a few facts from Errol Flynn's life, and rooting her story firmly in Jamaican history, Cezair-Thompson vividly imagines the life of Ida, who is little more than a child herself when she gives birth to her daughter May, the illegitimate child of 1930/40s movie star Errol Flynn - known as a swashbuckling adventurer on screen, and for his glittering parties and affairs off screen. Most of the action takes place in Jamaica, but even when Ida leaves the island for some years the author stays true to the Jamaican experience because, for at least a century, one of Jamaica's primary exports has been its people...continued
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(Reviewed by BookBrowse Review Team).
The island nation ofJamaica is in the Greater Antilles about 385 northeast of the Central American mainland, and about 90 miles south of Cuba. Within a century of Columbus sailing the ocean blue and the subsequent Spanish occupation of the island in 1494, the native Arawaks (who called the island Xaymaca) had effectively died out, due to smallpox and interbreeding with European and African settlers (the term Arawak is used to describe the Amerindians the Spanish encountered in the Caribbean, which included the Taino, Lucayan, Bimini, Nepoya, Suppoyo and Caribs).
The Spanish used the island that they called Santiago as a base for supporting the conquest of the Americas; economic activity consisted primarily of production for domestic ...
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Fred Powell, Main Street Books
Great story, wonderful/fully developed characters (will I ever forget Ida?), a little bit of Hollywood charm and name dropping (Capote, Monroe), but most interesting to me were all the political and social changes that were happening in Jamaica during the time period of the story.... Altogether a great book.
