Another in the longstanding series I have dubbed “bodily horror, the Bear Grylls edition.” There’s a character–usually a woman–who is super hungry for reasons of famine or winter or New World (and frequently all three) and we’re meant to understand something about the Human Condition through the suffering and depravity to which the body sinks.
See also: Vasterwilds, Lapvona, The Vegetarian, Tender is the Flesh, Glorious Exploits, Our Wives Under the Sea (yes, if you go back to my reviews of some of these you will see the same point).
This is based on a true story, so you know that there’s some interesting historical fiction at play here too. Essentially, our lead character is in one of those infuriating pre-modern-era coverture type arrangements where a cousin has been deemed her guardian and executor of her estate. He proceeds to mortgage and sell it off to become an Explorer and Conqueror of the New World, and Marguerite ends up being forced to journey alongside him. When she falls in love with his secretary on board the ship, he maroons both of them (+ her faithful nanny) on a random island and, eventually, dips back to France when it’s clear that colonizing is hard work.
Roberval (spelling?), her guardian, is one of two horrible sociopathic villain men that I read on the same flight–but Rochelle made an excellent point that dinging books for having “cartoonish” villains is sort of hypocritical after a year realizing that, well, that is how villains are. So I’m trying to not be so harsh on books that are otherwise good but for a slightly 2-D villain. His picture perfect use of emotional manipulation, and Marguerite’s slow dawning realization that that is what is happening (but being unable to do anything about it) is truly spine chilling.
I found her time on the titular island less harrowing than some other similar tales, if only because Goodman does do some handwaving. Marguerite at one point shoots a deer and then drags it into her cavern to process, which had me raising an eyebrow because a deer is like, hundreds of pounds. I don’t know that I could do that, and I eat three square meals a day and pay money to have someone force me to lift hundreds of pounds inside a building that I pay more money to be allowed to enter. But then again, is it really important? When she needed to, she did, even if at times she wanted to give up.
My only critique would be the weighting of the book–less bits before the ship, more bits after.
