Pelican Girls: A Novel

In the early days of settling Louisiana, almost a century before the land was bought by the American government, young women were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to be wives for the French settlers there. These were women with few to no prospects, often orphans or convicted criminals. For many, going to Louisiana was their best chance at a fresh start. Pelican Girls follows three of these women.

This book is a beautiful but mournful look at a group of women doing the best with the difficult life they were handed. It was not an easy situation for anyone, and Malye flinches away from nothing. Marrying a kind man was more a matter of luck than anything else. There were unfamiliar illnesses in Louisiana, and an unfamiliar climate. The territory was also already populated, and Malye gives the Natchez population weight in the latter half of the book rather than treating them as a vague, shadowy other.

Pelican Girls both took me by the hand and blew me away. I very highly recommend it and hope to read more of Malye’s work.