Between Two Shores
Catherine Stands-Apart, the half-Mohawk daughter of a selfish, drunken French trapper, must navigate between empires vying for control of North America in the Seven Years’ War while finding a way to balance the loyalties she feels to Gabriel Duval, the father she never abandoned, and Bright Star, the older sister who believes she turned her back on her people. When Samuel Crane, the British provincial captive who was ransomed, or bought, by her father, returns to Catherine’s homestead, her own sense of betrayal makes her wary of his plan to end to the war.
Between Two Shores by Jocelyn Green is, in its way, an epic North American story featuring cultural conflict and a wilderness journey. Its overall perspective is as balanced and diplomatic as the character Catherine can be at her best: there is sympathy for both the native and the European settler caught up in the conflict between their peoples. The characters of Bright Star and Joseph, Catherine’s fully Mohawk brother, are so fully developed that I found myself wishing this novel could be made into a film to show their perspective.
The chronological structure of Between Two Shores switches from prologues set in Catherine, Bright Star, and Samuel’s youth in the mid-1740s to the narrative’s main action in 1759. While this backstory is vital to building the reader’s sympathy for the characters and understanding their relationships, the sometimes-rapid changes in temporal setting can be hard to follow. But overall the novel succeeds as both a deep character study of an under-examined character type and as a broad portrait of the Seven Years’ War in its very North American context.
