Book review of Pelican Girls by Julia Malye

Pelican Girls by Julia Malye

In 1720 France shipped 88 “difficult” women from La Salpêtrière across the Atlantic to La Louisiane to become wives to settlers in the French colony. This is the story of three of them: teenage orphan Charlotte, accused abortionist Genevieve and troubled Petronille.

Married off soon after arrival, the friends are separated and have to make their own way in the steamy heat of New Orleans, or the up-country forests still occupied by the Native Natchez. Navigating dangerous fevers, childbirth, abusive husbands, and the febrile environment of a colony at war, Charlotte, Genevieve and Petronille learn how to survive, create their own path, and eventually find each other.

Pelican Girls is written from the perspective of all three women, and a Natchez girl who teaches Petronille about healing plants, whose stories run in parallel. The prose has a dream-like quality, evoking the strangeness of the new world our heroines encounter.

Light on plot, the novel focusses on how the three women develop over two decades. Ingenue Charlotte finds comfort in religion and teaching.  Independent Genevieve acquires assets from her dead husbands and discovers a trade that she loves. Petronille becomes absorbed in her new skill as a healer. 

Rich with historical detail, this novel made me think about the early days of America, and the challenging lives of the ordinary women, both Native and colonists, who negotiated so many dangers to carve out a viable life for their families and friends.

Author Julia Malye is on instagram @juliamalye

Published by Headline.

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