” … a person who can’t tolerate small misfortunes won’t ever accomplish nice issues”

All the time entranced by novels set on islands, this time I realized of the Thimble Islands. The Thimble Islands is an archipelago consisting of small islands in Lengthy Island Sound, positioned close to the southeast nook of Branford, Connecticut. Many of those tiny islands are house to just one dwelling, most of that are owned by rich People as summer time houses.

“Occasions are hardly ever remembered with out prejudice. We edit and excise, pasting them into our personal invisible histories, which we then reread constantly.”

The novel is about in 1898, and the tone and language used to inform the story are paying homage to that point. Even the title of the protagonist, Sequoia, will not be a reputation that’s heard a lot anymore.

“Isaiah Westcott had an an infection, a hereditary melancholy, and it’s seeped by the generations like a jar of molasses spilled on the high of a staircase. This entire household is gripped by and inescapable insanity.”

The household had been an eccentric lot, and appeared to have little regard for one different. There was a discernible feeling of unease as soon as Sequoia arrives on the island. Regardless that he ought to have been warmly welcomed because of the truth that he helped rescue a younger boy from the stormy waters of the Sound, they appeared to treat him with mistrust and coldness. The matriarch of the island was a medium who performed seances. They enlist Sequoia to participate in a seance which culminates in a risk to his very life!

“Individuals take pleasure in historical past, particularly when it occurred close by. It makes them really feel a part of an expertise grander than themselves.”

This was an eerie, atmospheric learn with gothic overtones. A ghost story, an anti-war novel, and a historic thriller rife with household secrets and techniques, antiquated language, and an total feeling of menace. That being mentioned, I discovered the novel much less participating as I had hoped. I felt the novel didn’t fairly stay as much as its potential.

Although I’m grateful to have learn it, and to have realized concerning the Thimble Islands, my private response to this quick novel was one among ambivalence.

This evaluation was written voluntarily and my ranking was by no means influenced by the truth that I obtained a complimentary digital copy of this novel from Regal Home Publishing through NetGalley.

Publication Date: March 25, 2025     ISBN: 9781646035380  –  184 pages

Jackson Kuhl is a author and writer specializing in American historical past, biography, and historic fiction.
His novel A Season of Whispers (Whitney & Submit, 2020) is a gothic thriller set in a Nineteenth-century utopian commune. Kirkus Evaluations referred to as it, “A slim however pleasant story of terror set in transcendentalist New England.”
A second gothic novella, The Island of Small Misfortunes, was printed in spring 2025 by Regal Home Publishing.
Kuhl’s first guide, Samuel Smedley, Connecticut Privateer (The Historical past Press, 2011), is a biography of the American Revolution’s most daring sea captain.
Kuhl lives in coastal Connecticut.

Join with Jackson Kuhl through his web site; Instagram, and/or BlueSky.