The Covert Buccaneer

De: S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour

Narrado por: Tavia Gilbert, Kate Reading

San Francisco. Two trailblazing women—separated by a century—fighting for their futures. The Covert Buccaneer is a sweeping, dual-timeline historical fiction, women’s fiction, legal drama, and love story.

1867-1919: Theodora “Teddy” Ellis is anything but ordinary. A pioneering miner, suffragist, and San Francisco real estate developer, she infiltrates male-dominated spaces in disguise, stakes claims in the ruthless Klondike, and fights for women’s rights and healthcare alongside her Miwok best friend. She survives the 1871 Chicago Fire and later helps rebuild San Francisco post-1906 earthquake and fire, reshaping the city’s future. But Teddy’s personal life is as unconventional as her ambitions—her relationships defy expectation, with the truth of her legacy lost to time.

2019-2020: Georgina “Ellie” Benvenuto is a divorced climate migrant attorney and single mother to a child with disabilities, struggling in a low-paying public interest job with a derailed legal career. As she wrestles with impossible personal and professional demands, she discovers her great-great-grandmother’s hidden diaries—revealing uncanny parallels to her own life. A long-forgotten heirloom of Teddy’s holds the key to a pivotal legal case—bringing the past crashing into the present and forcing Ellie to reconsider everything she understood about identity, love, and the cost of reinvention.

For listeners who love intergenerational mysteries woven with family secrets, lost heirlooms, and the weight of inheritance—much like recent bestsellers that blend past and present narratives with a feminist lens, such as The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, The Personal Librarian, and Winter Garden—this novel is a must-listen.

Already compared to Lessons in Chemistry, this richly atmospheric, meticulously researched novel explores resilience, reinvention, and the defiant women history tried to erase. Like The Alice Network and other Reese’s Book Club picks, it is sure to rivet listeners and spark discussion—perfect for fans of Jo Piazza and other GMA Book Club authors.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2025 S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour (P)2025 S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour

A Triumph

This dual timeline story is a triumph on all counts and deserves the accolades it's been receiving. The narration by Tavia Gilbert and Kate Reading is pitch perfect for the Ellie and Teddy story lines. A mesmerizing and powerful novel that shows us the impact of real writing as a craft (and painstaking research behind it). Great book club pick with a list of book club discussion questions at the back (I both read and listened to this title), and the author's note at the end is not to be missed! Richly layered and detailed, it's one of those novels I'll revisit to pick up on what i missed the first time around.

Rich Dual Timeline+Performances Deepen Every Level

The Covert Buccaneer is a rare novel that feels both sweeping and deeply personal. S. Lucia Kanter St. Amour weaves together two timelines—Ellie, a modern-day lawyer and single mother navigating bias and exhaustion, and her great-great-grandmother Theodora (“Teddy”), a nineteenth-century suffragist and pioneer of women’s empowerment. Their stories mirror one another in striking ways, revealing how progress isn’t linear and how resilience echoes across generations.

The book is richly textured: a family saga, legal drama, and historical fiction rolled into one, and always keeping its rhythm. The research is painstaking and wide-ranging, touching on significant historical moments, but it never feels heavy. Instead, the story pulses with wit, warmth, and sharp insight.

Both Ellie and Teddy are written with real honesty—flawed, complicated, and unapologetically human. They grapple with ambition, motherhood, injustice, and desire, while refusing to shrink into the roles society tries to impose.

The audiobook performances elevate the experience. Tavia Gilbert brings Ellie’s contemporary voice a grounded intelligence and emotional precision that makes her struggles feel immediate and lived-in. Kate Reading’s voicing of Teddy is equally compelling—measured, resolute, and quietly powerful—perfectly suited to the historical timeline. Together, the narrators reinforce the novel’s sense of continuity, making the parallels between past and present feel organic rather than constructed.

This is an ambitious, confident novel, and the audio version deepens its impact. It feels less like listening to a story and more like inhabiting history.

Masterful & captivating - both story & performance

The Covert Buccaneer is a sweeping, dual-timeline novel that is already remarkable on the page — but in audio, it truly comes alive.

Tavia Gilbert, as Ellie, captures every nuance of the modern storyline: sharp, resilient, and deeply human. Her performance has warmth and grit in equal measure, perfectly embodying a contemporary woman navigating family, career, and identity.

Kate Reading, voicing Teddy’s historic chapters, is simply exquisite. Her tone and cadence lend authenticity and gravity to the 19th-century timeline, immersing the listener in an era of mining camps, suffragists, and hidden histories.

Together, Gilbert and Reading form an ideal ensemble: two distinct voices in perfect counterpoint, weaving a story that feels seamless yet richly layered. Their performances don’t just narrate the book — they inhabit it.

This is historical fiction at its best, elevated by two masterful narrators who make you forget you’re listening to a recording. Unmissable.

Expansive, Intelligent, and Beautifully Performed

The Covert Buccaneer is a big book in the best sense of the word—expansive, layered, and ambitious. It works simultaneously as a family saga, a legal drama, and a dual-timeline historical novel, yet it never feels overburdened by its scope. Instead, it moves confidently between Gilded Age San Francisco and the present day, threading together questions of gender, inheritance, climate, and justice with unusual coherence.

I was captivated by how complex yet cohesive it all feels. The depth of research is evident in every scene, but it never reads like homework. The story is alive, propulsive, and often unexpectedly funny. There’s a dry wit running through the prose that surfaces even in tense or emotional moments, a reminder that history (and family) is made up of very human contradictions.

The audiobook performances elevate the material even further. Tavia Gilbert, narrating the modern timeline, brings clarity, intelligence, and emotional salience to Ellis’s voice, grounding the contemporary story with precision and warmth. Kate Reading, voicing Teddy in the historical timeline, is exceptional—rich, commanding, and utterly immersive. She gives Teddy a gravity and presence that feels earned, capturing both her defiance and her vulnerability. The dual narration doesn’t just distinguish the timelines; it deepens them, making the echoes between past and present more resonant.

It’s rare to encounter a book that is both sprawling and intimate, serious and sly, and rarer still to hear one so well matched to its narrators. The Covert Buccaneer manages all of it, leaving the listener with the sense that they’ve experienced not just a story, but a legacy being reclaimed.

Relatable characters with an enthralling story- Must Read!

Absolutely love this book! The characters feel so real and relatable, and I found myself caring about what happened to them. I could tell how personal the story is, think that is part of what makes it so appealing. It gives a depth to the characters that most books lack. I really enjoyed how the story moves between two generations — it’s woven together in a way that feels effortless and keeps you listening late into the night (finished it in two days).
A wonderful, engaging read. Definitely should be a book club pick!