Moonlight and the Pearler's Daughter: An Atmospheric Historical Mystery With a Courageous Heroine Intent on the Truth

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I was reminded of a book I loved as a girl about the daughter of a ship’s captain and her adventures across the Southern Pacific.

Pook introduced various interesting characters, such as Min, a mixed-race girl of an Asian father who was forced into prostitution to survive.A woman who proudly refuses to live by the repressive societal conventions expected from women of the day. The writing is wildly atmospheric, creating a clear image of this strange, raw place where the Brightwells live. Though I wasn’t wholly captivated by Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter, it is a solid debut, with a lot to recommend it. Where the author excels with her vivid descriptions of the dry Kimberly landscape, the community’s streets and residents, and the changing conditions of the sea, effortlessly evoking harsh heat, salt air and crashing waves. Pook sets up some intriguing female sidekicks—Eliza’s childhood friend Min, who becomes a prostitute, and deckhand Knife, who disguises herself as a boy—but their stories are not fully explored.

Readers will fall in love with the characters in this book, especially the courageous, stubborn Eliza, and will find themselves transported to Bannin Bay in the late 1800s. This was a wonderful tale with sparkling characters, a huge landscape, a sometimes violent seascape and the usual terrible racial tensions. At the train station where Jews are being jammed into cattle cars bound for Auschwitz, Udo gives Nico a yellow star to wear and persuades him to whisper among the crowd, “I heard it from a German officer. Eliza’s single-minded drive to save her family because of tragedy in her past feels familiar, and it doesn’t allow Eliza’s character to develop over the course of the book; her romantic relationship with a pearler named Axel barely registers. It’s not exactly clear why Axel volunteers to accompany Eliza, other than he is a decent young man who seems to have admired Eliza from afar.Though I could clearly visualise Eliza’s environment, I would have liked to learn more about the daily operations of a pearling fleet. Interspersed in the narrative is Charlie's journal, from which Eliza seeks clues as to what might have happened.