by Katherine Howe
narrated by Petrea Burchard
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A True Account by Katherine Howe is a historical fiction novel featuring pirates and dual timelines.
Featuring alternating dual timelines, Hannah Masury starts bound to service at a waterfront tavern in 1726 Boston but soon finds herself disguised as a cabin boy and mixed up with a rag-tag group of pirates. Professor Marian Beresford teaches at Cambridge in the 1930s, when a student brings her a journal that may lead them to pirate treasure.
I was really into this at the very beginning; Hannah really drew me in. The narrator does a great job reading, and the production quality is great. However, I didn’t like the ending and this overall wasn’t the knock out of the park that I was hoping for.
The earlier storyline is absolutely more developed than the latter. It also abruptly switches timelines. I really wish that in the audiobook version, the narrator would announce the subheadings of the timelines like they are in the print version. There are a handful of chapters that are really long.
Marian is also a queer woman in the 1930s. While I generally appreciate seeing representation in books, I think here it wasn’t used as well as it could have been. It felt like an afterthought, and only served to hurt her character further in various ways.
I received a copy of this book to review. Thank you to Henry Holt Books for the advanced reader copy, and NetGalley for the audio review copy. All opinions contained herein are my own.
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