Overview

"A sweeping epic in the vein of Philipp Meyer's The Son and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko and inspired by a true story, this stunning US literary debut captures the never-before-told journey of the Baleine Brides: a ship full of young women plucked from a Paris asylum and sent to marry settlers in North America's rough Louisiana Territory. Paris, 1720. La Salpêtrière hospital is in crisis: too many occupants, not enough beds. Halfway across the world, France's colony in the wilds of North America has space to spare and needs families to fill it. So the director of the hospital rounds up nearly a hundred female ""volunteers"" of childbearing age--orphans, prisoners, and mental patients--to be shipped to New Orleans. Among this group are three unlikely friends: a sharp-tongued twelve-year old orphan, a mute 'madwoman, ' and an accused abortionist. Charlotte, Pétronille, and Geneviève, along with the dozens of other women aboard La Baleine, have no knowledge of what lies ahead and no control over their futures. Strangers brought together by fate, these brave and fierce young women will face extraordinary adversity--pirates, slavedrivers, sickness, war--but also the private trauma of heartbreak and unrequited love, children born and lost, cruelty and unexpected pleasure, and a friendship forged in fire that will sustain through the years. At once a gorgeously written work of startling depth and emotion and a gripping drama marrying high-seas adventure with pioneer grit, Pelican Girls is a powerful, thought-provoking novel about female friendship and desire and the daunting compromises women are forced to make to survive."

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Julia Malye is the author of three novels published in France, she works as a creative writing instructor at Sciences Po Paris and as a translator for Les Belles Lettres publishing house. In 2015, she moved to the United States to study the craft of fiction and graduated from Oregon State University's MFA program in 2017. Since 2015, she's taught writing to hundreds of students both in the United States at Oregon State University, and in France at La Sorbonne Nouvelle, the American Business School of Paris, and Sciences Po Paris.

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