Review: The Night Ship

Jess Kidd, The Night Ship (Atria Books 2022)

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59366231-the-night-ship?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=6ozv5ao9rL&rank=1

6 stars!

Based on the true story of the sinking of the Batavia.
1629 A girl named Mayken, with her nursemaid Imke, boards the Batavia, setting out to find her father who lives in a land where ‘the midday sun is fierce enough to melt a Dutch child’. Her mother has died ‘from the bloody flux’. Francisco Pelsaert is the upper-merchant, Jeronimus Cornelisz the under-merchant and Ariaean Jacobsz the skipper. In the next cabin is Lucretia Jansdochter and her maid Zwaatie. Jan Pelgrom, Pelsaert’s steward, helps her to go to the Below World, disguised as a cabin boy and calling herself Obbe, in which guise she delivers drugs for the butcher-surgeon. There’s some kind of monster down in the hold. Utter horror ensues after the shipwreck.
1989 Gil, a boy mourning his mother, is placed in the care of his fisherman grandfather Joss off the Australian coast. His mother has died ‘from a mishap’. He meets Silvia Zanetti, wife of the foremost fisherman Frank, whose stepson Roper has a metal plate in his head. Silvia won’t take Gil inside her house because of ‘what he did’. The island has a ghost, a girl from the shipwreck of the Batavia—islanders leave gifts for her—and Gil has a pet tortoise. Scientists are digging up remains of the wreck of the ship that had ‘set sail with a psycho on board’. There’s are ancient feuds between Joss and the other fishermen that play out between Gil and the other boys,
Gorgeously written, the Voices in this novel are remarkable. Mayken is stalwart, willing to courier drugs for the surgeon in return for being allowed to watch him amputate a sailor’s leg, willing to confront a monster to save her beloved nurse. The Batavia is so horrifying, crawling with rats and eels—we never know whether we’re inside one of Maykens’ nightmares. Gil is the loneliest of boys, persecuted by the island children and full of dark secrets.
I was given this book by the Historical Novel Society because I had reviewed for them Anatomy of a Heretic by David Mark, which also treated the sinking of the Batavia.