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Reviewed by Asher Syed for Readers' Favorite
Sailing Against the Tide by Cindy Burkart Maynard follows Jeanne Baret from rural Burgundy in the 1740s into the expanding world of French science and exploration during the 1760s. After her father’s death forces her off the land, Jeanne relies on her botanical knowledge to earn a living, work that takes her into the household and research of the physician botanist Philibert Commerson. Her work becomes essential to his collections, records, and health. When Commerson is appointed the naturalist on a French circumnavigation voyage, Jeanne assumes a male identity to continue her work aboard the supply ship L’Etoile. As the voyage carries her across oceans and colonial ports, the book traces how one woman moves from village fields into the machinery of eighteenth-century exploration.
Sailing Against the Tide by Cindy Burkart Maynard is a wonderful historical novel that gives readers a first-person perspective of eighteenth-century France by way of the brilliant Jeanne. The period details are excellent, and Maynard includes small touches like Jeanne’s herbal notebooks on remedies, and the exacting routines of naval timekeeping aboard L’Etoile. Jeanne herself is a bastion of female agency, and I love how this is shown in the way she builds her botanical knowledge into paid work and chooses survival on her own terms, particularly during voyage hardships. The settings are almost cinematically rendered, from the Burgundian fields shaped by seasonal labor to the cramped quarters aboard L’Etoile. Readers who enjoy quality novels with maritime history, women in science, and character-driven narratives will find it all in this exceptionally well-written literary voyage.
