Daughters of Captain Cook - Softcover

The haunting tone and exotic ambience of this first novel draw the reader through the subtle, mysterious story to a shockingly swift denouement. Kansas-born Jesse Quill, trailing her own emotional emptiness, and her husband, Paul, are living on the site of his ancestral homestead in Hawaii, where they are desultorily engaged in raising their young daughter. The island's ancient culture, with its pantheistic galaxies, invades their lives in the person of a 14-year-old child-woman, the sensuously abandoned Maya, who is the cause of Paul's infidelity, the knowledge of which brutally raises Jesse from her complacency. As Jesse unravels the murky history of Paul's parents, she discovers that Maya's mother is not only Paul's sister but had also engaged in a similar scenario with his father. Against the age-old belief that sexual union within the first degree of consanguinity is not only licit but also an extraordinary empowerment from the gods, Jesse's struggle to retain Paul is doomed. The lush island flora against which theculture clash unfolds is stunninglyevoked in a mesmerizing, chilling tale.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Set against a sensuous, vibrant background of Hawaiian hibiscus and ancient rites of worship, this powerful, compelling story merges two diverse currents: that of Paul, son of a missionary, and of his Kansas-born wife Jesse, who knew nothing of her father except photographs and post cards. Wedded bliss becomes a nightmare of compulsive attraction, betrayal, and death as Jesse, pitted against unbeatable odds, tries to keep Paul from irresistible 14-year-old Maya. Behind Maya stands a mysterious family past, which Jesse uncovers in her mother-in-law's diary; its shocking revelations include the age-old native belief that the union of father and daughter, brother and sister, will produce chiefs and supernatural power. Forcefully yet inevitably, events speed to a climax, leaving behind memories, wind, and rain. For most fiction collections.
- Addie Lee Bracy, Beaver Coll. Lib., Glenside, Pa.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.