Pelican Girls

A Novel

By: Julia Malye

Narrated by: Polly Edsell

Length: 15 hrs and 56 mins

Publisher's summary

A sweeping epic in the vein of Philipp Meyer’s The Son and Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko and inspired by a true story, this stunning US literary debut captures the never-before-told journey of the Baleine Brides: a ship full of young women plucked from a Paris asylum and sent to marry settlers in North America's rough Louisiana Territory.

Paris, 1720. La Salpêtrière hospital is in crisis: too many occupants, not enough beds. Halfway across the world, France's colony in the wilds of North America has space to spare and needs families to fill it. So the director of the hospital rounds up nearly a hundred female “volunteers” of childbearing age—orphans, prisoners, and mental patients—to be shipped to New Orleans.

Among this group are three unlikely friends: a sharp-tongued twelve-year old orphan, a mute ‘madwoman,’ and an accused abortionist. Charlotte, Pétronille, and Geneviève, along with the dozens of other women aboard La Baleine, have no knowledge of what lies ahead and no control over their futures. Strangers brought together by fate, these brave and fierce young women will face extraordinary adversity—pirates, slavedrivers, sickness, war—but also the private trauma of heartbreak and unrequited love, children born and lost, cruelty and unexpected pleasure, and a friendship forged in fire that will sustain through the years.

At once a gorgeously written work of startling depth and emotion and a gripping drama marrying high-seas adventure with pioneer grit, Pelican Girls is a powerful, thought-provoking novel about female friendship and desire and the daunting compromises women are forced to make to survive.

©2024 Julia Sixtine Marie Malye (P)2024 HarperCollins Publishers

Historical perspective of my home state.

I felt that the story was rather disorganized, and I wondered all along if it had been written by a European rather than someone who lived in Louisiana. Some of the references were off. For example, the land around Natchez was referred to as the prairie. Prairies are in Oklahoma, Nebraska, and the Midwest rather than in the south. There are fields in the south. The reader’s pronunciation of New Orleeeenz was annoying. It’sNew Or-lunz. But mainly, the storyline went from topic to topic and didn’t cover many in-depth. My least favorite book that I’ve read this year.