Barbados Bound
Portsmouth, England,1760: Penniless Patricia Kelley, the illegitimate daughter of a plantation owner in Barbados, stows away on board a ship bound for Barbados to claim her inheritance. In Patricia’s imagination, she has simply to travel to Barbados to claim her deceased father’s sugarcane plantation, a letter from her father her only link to a world she knows nothing about. She secretly hides after coming aboard a merchant ship with a group of prostitutes.
When Patricia is discovered, her adventure begins. Fears of being set ashore in Madeira are put to rest when she is indentured to the ship’s surgeon. Beginning training as a ‘loblolly’, Patricia finds herself learning a skill, and, despite her heart belonging to another, marrying the surgeon and taking the name MacPherson.
Barbados Bound was initially published as a young adult novel, yet this was simply due to the age of our heroine and it most certainly does not belong in that category.
There are quite a few typos in this book—a quick proofread would pick these out. They are detrimental to the production of the book, but not the story.
Not many authors can pull off writing in the first person, Collison manages this with such a skill however, that it would be impossible to imagine it written any other way. Barbados Bound is an incredible page-turner of a book, one that will have you reading well into the night.
