Kate Worsley - She Rises

Rating: 4/5

Review:
Very good after a slow start

This is an enjoyable book which is excellent in places, although I do have some reservations. Set in the mid-18th century, it takes the form of two intercut narratives. One is a third person account of Luke, a young boy press-ganged into the Royal Navy and his subsequent adventures, and the other a first person account by Louise, a Suffolk dairymaid who goes into service as a lady's maid with a rich Harwich family. The stories are well told, especially in the latter half of the book, and eventually form a very engrossing narrative of adventure and a powerful love story. I don't want to give away any more and strongly recommend that you try to avoid spoilers for this book: the way in which the two stories are linked emerges slowly and is one of the most interesting parts of reading it.

Kate Worsley has created interesting characters and can write very well. I found her account of the life of a pressed man in the Navy excellent (and a fine complement to the officer-focused tales of Forester or O'Brian.) She generates a good atmosphere and some parts, like the passage where Luke goes aloft to take in sail for the first time for example, are simply excellent.

I have two reservations about this book. The first is with Louise's narrative voice, which, at the beginning of the novel in particular, ends up being in neither Worsley's own enjoyably literary style nor that of a rural girl in 1740. There are phrases thrown in like, "She was that bit older than me, see," while most of the narrative is more of the style of Louise seeing the sea for the first time: "It was the lack of boundary that unnerved me. I had never seen water so wide, distance so unbounded." The two styles clashed very badly and prevented me from hearing the voice of a credible character. The second reservation is that the beginning of the book in particular needs some tightening up and could have done with being a good deal shorter. The opening is terrific, but Louise's story in particular took an age to become at all involving, and I found it a bit of a slog getting to page 150 or so. After that it really took off, though, and I enjoyed it very much.

These flaws didn't ruin it by any means, but did detract from what could have been a very good book indeed. This is still very well worth reading - eventually it is a very good historical novel, but I found it took quite some effort to get through the first third of it.