New Book Alert: Sailing by Carina's Star (The Constellation Trilogy Book 2) by Katie Crabb; Dramatic Confrontations Abound as Family and Loyalty Lines Are Redrawn

 

New Book Alert: Sailing by Carina's Star (The Constellation Trilogy Book 2) by Katie Crabb; Dramatic Confrontations Abound as Family and Loyalty Lines Are Redrawn

By Julie Sara Porter

Bookworm Reviews

Spoilers: The previous volume of Katie Crabb's Constellation Trilogy, Sailing by Orion's Star, ended with Rene Delacroix, a wealthy Captain's white son, Frantz Seymour, the biracial son of Captain Delacroix's deceased first mate, and Auden Carlyle, Rene and Frantz's gambler friend ran away from their Jamaican homes of abuse and slavery and joined the pirate crew of Ajani Danso, AKA, Robin Hood The Merciful. Nicholas Jerome, Captain Delacroix's current first mate and surrogate son, angrily vowed that he would find them no matter how long it took.

The second volume, Sailing by Carina's Star, continues to redefine the terms of family and friends and puts the characters in situations that change and mature them.

In this volume,Jerome, now a Lieutenant in the English Royal Navy, is making a name for himself as a pirate catcher. However, one crew seems to slip from his grasp. A reunion with his long estranged Romany mother, Tiena, does not soften Jerome. In fact, it only makes him more determined to find Rene and the others. He owes it to Michel Delacroix, now Commodore of the East India Company, a man that Jerome considers his father.

Meanwhile, Danso's crew has grown. Besides Abeni, his female quartermaster and best friend, Rene, Frantz, and Auden, he also has Abeni's daughter Flora, Danso's nephew Jahni, and new crew members, Chema Guerra, Elliot Roux, Benoit Martel, Marc Favreau, and Eli Matos. Rene, Frantz, and Auden have become experienced sailors, so much so that rumors spread about the three young pirates, particularly a fair haired one on Robin Hood's crew. Danso's crew and legend grows so much that when he gets a new ship, the Saiph to accompany his Misericorde, the vote is unanimous to make Rene the consort captain, Frantz the sailing master, and Auden as quartermaster. In fact, Rene gains quite a reputation of his own and names such as Robin Hood's Devil, The Red Devil, Lucifer, and (his favorite) The Morning Star.

This book sees a huge age lift for many of the young characters. Jerome and the boys ended the previous book in their late twenties and mid teens respectively. In this volume Jerome is approaching forty and the young men are now in their twenties. With that aging comes great change and maturity and the desire to cling to old values or completely break away from them. 

After Delacroix and Jerome have been promoted, they have moved away from personally involving themselves in the slave trade, though still condoning it. One hopes that their final encounter with Danso, Abeni, and particularly Rene and Frantz shook them up enough to open up some humanity in them, but realistically they are more concerned with catching pirates and have one major project at a time to work on. 

In fact, Jerome has regressed considerably in character. In the previous book, he was determined to follow Delacroix’s orders and maintain what he considered law and order on the high seas; however he still showed glimpses of being a good person at heart. He spent time teaching Rene about sword fighting and telling sea stories to him and Frantz. He treated Delacroix like the father that he desperately needed. He sometimes fought inward battles between what he personally believed and what his orders were, with orders always coming first.  Now those flashes of humanity are gone.

Instead the years of regimentation, rules, and regulations have taken their toll turning Jerome into an unremorseful, bigoted, hateful, tool of the British Navy. When he reunites with his mother, instead of having a tearful embrace (like Frantz does when he reunites with his missing mother, Chantal), he yells at her and turns her away. He thinks of her as a stain on his reputation (because he believes that if word gets out that he’s half-Romany, he would be removed from his position at the very least and imprisoned at the very worst). Even though there is brief talk of him getting married, Jerome is a Navy man through and through. While he is still a loyal surrogate son to Delacroix, his ambitions and his remorseless behavior have made him completely monstrous and no longer identifiable.

Rene, Danso, and the other pirates on the other hand have become stronger in terms of character and their relationships with each other. Besides being a brave and effective leader who has earned the respect of his crew, Danso has become a father figure to his men and women. He worries when the younger members are on their own missions and is protective of them. He doesn’t have children of his own, but he treats Rene, Frantz, Auden. Jahni, and Flora like his own. 

He also encourages them and knows that he can’t keep them sheltered forever which is why he lets them crew the Saiph because he trusts them. Unlike Delacroix who was well meaning but wanted to keep Rene sheltered, Danso knows that the young people in his care will face the world on their own and he might as well prepare them for it. 

Abeni also comes into her own, becoming a fierce and loyal first mate. In a couple of chapters, Danso becomes incapacitated and unable to captain. Abeni has to fill in and does so becoming proactive and assertive instead of the more diplomatic Danso. She also obtains a love interest in the patient and kind, Eli. 

The other pirates also become stronger in various pages as a family, crew, and individual characters. Their circle expands to include many other pirates and civilians who are on their side. Real life characters like Edward “Blackbeard” Teach, Sam Bellamy, Anne Bonney, Mary Read, and “Calico '' Jack Rackham encounter the Misericorde crew giving their “arrs” of approval. Danso and Abeni’s former crewmates, lovers Collins and Robins, help them and later they return the favor. After Jerome rejects his mother, Tiena, the Misericorde gang not only accept her but introduce her to Frantz’s mother, Chantal, who hires her to work with her. Even Rene’s mother, Astra Delacroix remains where she is in her stately home in Kingston but remembers how she helped the boys escape to the Misericorde. She states to her husband and her father that she would rather the boys remain pirates than return to a life of imprisonment for Frantz and misery for Rene.

Similar to Fearghus Academy: Precarious Gems, one of the ways to show the characters’ developing maturity is to explore their romantic interests and pair them up. Besides Abeni and Eli, new pirates  Eliot and Benoit become a couple, as do Flora and Auden. While Rene and Frantz are best friends, their previous relationship was clearly one of deep emotion and platonic pairing. This is finally the volume where they confess their love for each other and become an out and proud couple that men like their fathers were afraid to become. The feeling from the Reader is less “I knew it” than a relieved “Finally!” when the duo confess their love. 

Of the characters, Rene is the most developed. In the first volume, he was a wide eyed kid drawn by the adventure of the high seas and piracy. He left Jamaica as a stand against the slavery institution that his grandfather, father, and Jerome represent. His humanity and his love for Frantz were more important than that. 

In the second volume, he is less wide eyed and innocent. He is someone who has killed to defend his crew and is unafraid to do so again. Thanks to Jerome’s teaching, he is quite the swordsman (as Frantz is aces with firing guns), and will fight with a vengeful fury. In fact his fair hair, red coat, and angry fighting style are what earned him the nicknames of the “Red Devil” and “Lucifer the Morning Star.” (Because he “looks like Satan before the Fall and fights like him after” legends say). He takes the insults that his grandfather gave him like “monster” and “devil” and turns them around to take pride in them as someone who will fight like a demon for those he cares about.

 One mark of Rene's maturity is his ambivalence about accepting the captaincy. Ever since he was a boy he and Frantz shared the dream of Rene becoming captain of a ship and Frantz being his navigator. While he proves himself as a great sailor and teammate to Danso and the rest of the crew, he is at first reluctant to take the consort captaincy. He doesn’t dodge the possibility of leadership, in fact takes the lead in small groups. But the offer of becoming a captain awakens not only his old ambitions but memories of the abuse inflicted from his grandfather and the indifference from his father. He is afraid of becoming like them. It takes Frantz’s declaration of love and unshakable faith for him to accept the captaincy and the reputation that comes afterwards of becoming the “Red Devil.”

Sailing by Orion’s Star had plenty of suspenseful chapters of the crew nearly getting caught but escaping. Since Sailing by Carina’s Star is darker, they aren’t always so lucky. Some get caught and their rescue takes a tremendous toll on their numbers. It also ends with a cliffhanger in which some are put in the worst position possible and face imprisonment, exile, or the gallows. 

With the characters maturing and the situation becoming darker for the characters, the third part of the Constellation Trilogy should be a final decisive climactic ending for the characters and the new families that they have formed in the ashes of the old ones.