The Pelican Bride by Beth White - I don't think I would have found this delightful historical romance on my own, so I'm glad that a couple of book blogs I follow happened to mention it. The cover and title were enough to spark my interest! This is the first in a series, with the second book planned for release in spring of 2015.
I haven't seen many historical novels that deal with this particular setting - the French colonies of the Gulf Coast, so that made it quite intriguing. The main character is Genevieve Gaillain, a young Huguenot Frenchwoman who travels with her younger sister and a number of other young French ladies to the Louisiana colony, agreeing to marry one of the French men establishing the colony. The twist is that the colonists are expected to be staunch Catholics (by order of King Louis - and the persecution of Huguenots is going on in France at this time, the year 1704), so Genevieve must keep her faith a secret. She catches the eye of Tristan Lanier almost immediately, and it seems he has his own secrets. Tristan is a cartographer who wants to keep his distance from the French colonists and especially the soldiers in the fort, and initially declares that he has no intention of taking a wife. But as is the way of romance novels, he and Genevieve do marry and there is a growing and genuine affection between them that is threatened by the dangerous times in which they live and by those who are plotting against them and the entire colony and would betray them all.
From the first chapter, I was drawn into the story and found the book hard to put down. It is well-written with complex characters and layered plots that sometimes took unexpected twists. I did have trouble keeping some of the characters straight near the beginning of the book, when they were referred to with only a first name and I had to remember which last name it went with. As I got further into it, the characters got settled in my memory though. The only other thing that puzzled me was near the end - there are a couple of sections in which the narrative focuses on the point of view of the Indian woman Nika, and the names were written in the narrative and in the dialogue as the Indian character pronounced them (Marc-Antoine was referred to as Mah-Kah-Twah). Although this did reinforce that the action was being described as Nika would have perceived it, I found it a little odd to see a French character addressing another as Mah-Kah-Twah, or to see the Indian pronunciation used in the narrative, even though the narrative was still in third person.
I will be looking forward to next installment in this series!
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