Arctangential

I finished Cat Island last night. It was about as I expected.

This story continues following Favian Markham, the main character of the two previous books in the series. If you recall, he’s just discovered an impending attack by the British on New Orleans and is on the way there to warn them. He arrives, and then I guess it turns out that the Brits won’t be there for a month, so he has a few adventures in the city, including accidentally getting married to a young girl, meeting his cousin Gabriel (from book 2) and his wife, inventing draw poker (!) and other such things. Eventually he runs into Jean Lafitte, a famous pirate of the time, who warns them of a group of ex-Napoleonic veterans massing on an island in the Gulf who are planning on helping the British in their attack. This leads Favian to visit the eponymous island and remove the force from its fort there. Then follows some raiding of the attacking fleet and a few interesting sea battles, and then a chapter summing up the next 7 or 8 years of history.

Frankly, I don’t think Williams ever planned on writing 5 books here. The first 3 were very good and made a well-planned trilogy, but the next two felt very tacked-on and didn’t fit into the pattern of those that came before them. Now don’t get me wrong — they were both very well-written, and I enjoyed reading them, but they didn’t really explore any new ground, character-wise. I almost wonder if this book wasn’t ended they way it was because the author didn’t want to be able to write any more books in the series.

Anyways, I’m now reading Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Good stuff.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2006 at 2:12 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.