KIRKUS REVIEW OF WEST OF WISDOM
TITLE INFORMATION
WEST OF WISDOM
A Tale of Lust and Love in the South Pacific
Cutler, Edwin P.
Trafford (228 pp.)
$19.95 paperback, $3.99 eBOOK
ISBN: 978-1412060837; June 30, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
In Cutler's (West of Wisdom, 2006) novel, a Canadian man intends to sail his grandfather's boat solo through the islands of the South Pacific, but a surprise passenger brings love and adventure as they flee from pirates who think they hold the key to a lost treasure.
A coarse, glass-eyed man attempts to board Tim Tyler's Cithara in the dark,
mistaking it for the nearly identical pirate ship Harp. After forcibly incapacitating Glasseye with a heavy blow to the head, Tim fishes out of the water the duffel the man carried to find Astarte Bernard inside.
Astarte, on tour in the Marquesas Islands in the hope of visiting the place where her missionary grandparents were married and later captured by pirates, had been kidnapped because of a message in a bottle from her grandfather, found years after the pirate ship he was on burned and sank.
The novel relies heavily on standard tropes of the seafaring adventure tale: the glass-eyed pirate, the treasure-yielding riddle, the tropical storm miraculously survived without adding novelty or elevating any of the characters beyond stereotype. It also retains the sexism and colonialist sentiment common in older tales. The pirates who abduct Astarte love her after she makes them clean up their messy ship and cooks them delicious meals.
The local inhabitants mistake Astarte for her grandmother, whom they revere as a returned goddess, and speak in a simple English. Cutler weaves nautical definitions into the text, keeps the reader clear on the Cithara's route with mini-maps each time the boat changes location, and illustrates the book with what look like exotic vacation photos.
An expression of clear passion for tropical-ocean travel, hung weakly on a flat, predictable story.
Kirkus Indie, Kirkus Media LLC, 6411 Burleson Rd., Austin, TX 78744
indie@kirkusreviews.com
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