Out Front The Following Sea
There are times when I pick up a historical fiction and I immediately fall into the language, understand the characters, absorb the subtlety; there are other times when the fiction is so steeped in history and the time of its setting that it takes effort to acclimate. The later was the case with Leah Angstman’s brand-new historical fiction Out Front the Following Sea (2022). Yet it was a compulsive read brimming with historical nuance and suspense; one well worth the study it demanded in its early chapters.
This novel begins on the eve of a brutal winter on the edges of a seventeenth-century Jersey town in colonial America. It was after many pages that I discovered the glossary of words—colonial English, Pequot, French, and Dutch—included. This certainly assisted my reading from that point on, and enabled me to more fully understand the complexity of this slender slice of New England history upon which Angstman builds her novel.
In the first scene, the reader meets the English colonist and heroine, Ruth Miner, as she attempts to barter for food at the town market. The disdain of her neighbors clearly marks teenage Ruth as an outcast. In fact, she exists in a precarious balance beyond the strict rules that govern colonial American communities throughout this novel. The tension between her independence, her complicated history, and her beloved provides the reader with no shortage of suspense and drama, heartbreak and triumph.
Quickly the reader also meets the novel’s male protagonist, a French- and English-speaking sailor named Owen Townsend, second mate to his father, the captain of a swift new ship, Primrose. Intimacy punctuates their first interaction and suggests that Owen and Ruth have known each other for many years, even though their mutual backstory is shrouded in mystery. From the onset, their sibling-like relationship is noticeably tinged by a romantic tension. It is one that will drive much of the conflict in Out Front The Following Sea.
Angstman’s novel is fast-paced and filled with a diverse cast of characters who maneuver the brutal realities of seventeenth-century life. These include a band of Pequot managing to survive in the dark shadows of the forests in the years after King Phillip’s War, New England Puritans, Quakers, highway men, colonial Dutch and French, and men of the sea. In fact, Out Front the Following Sea reveals the complexity of colonial American life and the many cultures present in seventeenth-century New England.
Indeed, Out Front The Following Sea forces its reader to re-imagine whatever simple vision he may have of early colonial New England life. The novel’s synopsis claims the beginning of King William’s War in 1689 as its setting. This is a war I previously knew nothing about, but I quickly discovered it boiled down to an age-old conflict between the French and English. Ruth’s adventures end up intertwined with the upstanding English commander, Lieutenant General Samuel Whitlock, a real historical figure, fictionalized in Out Front The Following Sea. Through his character, the reader intimately witnesses the mechanism of royal control in the American colonies. This novel demonstrates the many ways the Old World rivalry made its way across the Atlantic, dividing neighbors and families on the basis of one’s mother tongue. In fact, language plays an important role in developing characters and bringing history to life throughout the novel, as Angstman weaves Pequot, French, and Dutch words into her English story.
The complexity of this historical period in no ways minimizes its brutality. Out Front The Following Sea includes some graphic moments of death and suffering as the reader experiences such things as the harshness of surgery without anesthesia, town meetings that demand justice by way of witnessing another’s suffering, and the wildly limited options available to independently-minded women. Perhaps it comes as no surprise that love, loyalty, and friendship overcome many of the barriers that King and Crown might wish to enforce. But the path Ruth takes is treacherous and includes plenty of nail-biting moments even up to the novel’s final pages.
This may not be a gentle read, but it is a wildly engaging one. Angstman transports her reader to the American colonies in the late seventeenth century, which she firmly roots in meticulous historical research and linguistic care. The love story and suspense, more than the historical geopolitics, at the heart of Out Front The Following Sea had me frantically reading to the end.
Bibliography:
Angstman, Leah. Out Front the Following Sea. Regal House Publishing: 2022.
A Few Great Passages:
“My father told me tales, but mostly: books. I only ever saw the world through questions. It exists in my mind, on pages of someone else’s stories, the places where the sea can reach, this Motherland of England we fight for, yet have never seen. We should only fight for land we know—” (107).
“We all have brands—some show; some don’t. But we all wear them. It is not ours to judge these transgressions of others while we wear our own” (210).
“What’s a woman’s purpose, son, but to encourage the wicked ways of another woman against all of man’s laws and conventions?” (281).
