Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury
By Kinley Bryan
Publication Date: 12th October 2021. Publisher: Blue Mug Press. Page Length: 324 Pages. Genre: historical fiction
Three sisters. Two Great Lakes. One furious storm.
Based on actual events...
It's 1913 and Great Lakes galley cook Sunny Colvin has her hands full feeding a freighter crew seven days a week, nine months a year. She also has a dream—to open a restaurant back home—but knows she'd never convince her husband, the steward, to leave the seafaring life he loves.
In Sunny’s Lake Huron hometown, her sister Agnes Inby mourns her husband, a U.S. Life-Saving Serviceman who died in an accident she believes she could have prevented. Burdened with regret and longing for more than her job at the dry goods store, she looks for comfort in a secret infatuation.
Two hundred miles away in Cleveland, youngest sister Cordelia Blythe has pinned her hopes for adventure on her marriage to a lake freighter captain. Finding herself alone and restless in her new town, she joins him on the season’s last trip up the lakes.
On November 8, 1913, a deadly storm descends on the Great Lakes, bringing hurricane-force winds, whiteout blizzard conditions, and mountainous thirty-five-foot waves that last for days. Amidst the chaos, the women are offered a glimpse of the clarity they seek, if only they dare to perceive it.
Book Rating:
📚📚📚📚📚⭐ = A book in a million
📚📚📚📚📚 = I could not put this book down. I Highly Recommend it.
📚📚📚📚 = A really great read.
📚📚📚 = It was enjoyable.
📚📚 = It was okay.
📚 = Um...! 😕
Book Review
Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury
📚📚📚📚📚⭐ = A book in a million
There are some books that you read, and that you know you will, eventually, read it again, because you enjoyed it, and know that you will enjoy it a second time through. This book is not one of them. This book is the kind of book that you finish and do not set aside, but immediately turn back to the start and start again, because this is not the kind of book that you move on from, but the kind that stays with you forever.
The three sisters, something that occurs in Lake Superior, where three waves hit a ship, the last one accumulating the other two to create a wave that lands on the deck of the ship. Something that no one wants to come into contact with. And yet, this book is about a different kind of three sisters. Three women who have grown up around water, who are all affected differently, but equally, by the onslaught of a storm, a storm worse than any ship’s crew has ever seen.
Sunny and Cordelia find themselves on ships, Sunny as a cook among a crew she has known and worked alongside for years, and Cordelia being newly married to a ship captain and wanting to spend more time with him. Agnes, the eldest, is on shore when the storm hits, but that doesn’t mean she is safe. With a storm such as the one that overtook the Great Lakes in 1913, no one was entirely safe.
This book puts you in the shoes of these three women, as they battle the storm from where they find themselves. I have never read anything about the Great Lakes before, to be honest, I didn’t know they existed until I read this book, and I knew little about ships. This book didn’t just give me a story, it instilled within me something I am not sure I have felt when reading a book before. I truly lived this story alongside the characters. At times, when reading, I was sure my feet were numb from the cold, and that I could hear rain and wind outside, and yet, I was warm and the weather was mild. I don’t live near water, but I could hear crashing waves, and I felt the fear that the characters felt.
My reviews do not usually last for quite this long, but I find myself incapable of stopping. I can easily see this book as an award-winning movie, something like Titanic, but much more fast-paced, and with multiple different perspectives, showing the true extent of the damage. That is a movie I would love to see, although saying that, I have already seen it, when I read this book. This book is calling me back to it, like the pull that some people have towards the water. I am drawn towards this story, and I can do nothing but read it again, and again, and again, until I know every word by heart.
Kinley Bryan
Kinley Bryan is an Ohio native who counts numerous Great Lakes captains among her ances-tors. Her great-grandfather Walter Stalker was captain of the four-masted schooner Golden Age, the largest sailing vessel in the world when it launched in 1883. Kinley’s love for the in-land seas swelled during the years she spent in an old cottage on Lake Erie. She now lives with her husband and children on the Atlantic Coast, where she prefers not to lose sight of the shore. Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury is her first novel.
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I am so glad you enjoyed Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury - you review is fabulous!!
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for hosting today's tour stop.
Mary Anne
The Coffee Pot Book Club
Thank you for your wonderful review. I am thrilled that you enjoyed Sisters of the Sweetwater Fury. And I would love to see it as a movie, too ;-)
ReplyDeleteKinley