Primitive Passions (The Boschloper Saga, Book 1)
“Surely, though, it must have been an exciting life!” a character exclaims to Sean O’Cathail at one point in Primitive Passions, the first volume in John Cahill’s Boschloper Saga. Right from the start of the novel, it certainly proves true: sixteen-year-old Sean, having enlisted in the British Navy in hopes of escaping his dreary prospects back in Ireland, deserts his shipmates and captain in order to strike out on his own in the New York of 1681, a wild frontier world of Dutch and English settlers, prickly Iroquois, and fortunes to be made. Cahill organizes Primitive Passions around the life and adventures of Sean as he learns the world of fur trading, the intricacies of colonial life, and, in the book’s most picaresque plotline, the ways of love, pursuing parallel relationships with both a serving girl in town and a Native American woman on the other side of the social divide. Sean’s faith-and-begorrah Irish “accent” can grow a bit tiresome over the course of four-hundred pages, but Cahill’s humor and energy more than compensate.
