Daughter of the Shipwreck
Mercy Whitworth, a nineteen-year-old orphan, arrives in London in 1820 to live with her recently deceased’s guardian’s cousin, Dr. Stephens, and his wife, Catherine. The servants look askance at her, and she thinks it’s because she’s Black—which is a positive for Catherine, an indefatigable campaigner for abolition. Mercy’s assumptions will be challenged over and over in her new home.
Daughter of the Shipwreck moves along at a nice pace, and the characters are well-developed. It felt a little odd to backtrack through time at the second part of the book; it might have been more effective to have them parallel through the story, although that potentially would have spoiled a plot twist (which is a bit exposed by the publisher’s summary). Once the two stories sync up in time, the novel is at its most effective.
A lovely aspect of the story is that most of the characters are not what they seem on first acquaintance. Davies is adept at making her characters human, with traits that both attract and repel, and resist easy answers.
The novel does an excellent job of showing how Blackness was equated with slavery and how insidious the practice of slavery was, with people from all walks of life being affected or involved in it. Davies also explores how class and markers of class also play into bias in an effective way. Well-plotted and enjoyable, Daughter of the Shipwreck is an adventure to check out.
