February is Pirates and Privateers month in which I feature books with love on the high seas! So let the adventure begin with this story by a great author.
Set in 1792, this tells of Delilah Remy from the British island of Barbados who visits her great aunt in Virginia with the hopes of finding a suitor she actually wants (having previously turned down two dozen proposals and not being very thrilled with her father’s choice). One night she encounters Joss San Pietro, the first man she’s ever been attracted to. He’s tall, dark and terribly handsome and much more mature than the fops who she’s been exposed to and better that the oh-so-dull man her father would see her marry on Barbados where they have a plantation. But the night they meet, Lilah and Joss learn a terrible secret about him that means they can never be together: Joss is not entirely white.
Robards deals well with a sensitive issue at a time when England had no slaves but America did. Joss is an educated businessman, a merchant sea captain with his own ships, but his one drop of African blood rules him out as a suitor and throws him into slavery.
On the voyage south to Barbados, where Joss accompanies Lilah as her slave, they will be shipwrecked on a tropical island for months where none of the rules apply.
Robards tells a great tale with wonderful characters and a deep romance that defies the rules of the day. It kept me turning pages.
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