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Loading... When Captain Flint Was Still a Good Man| 112 | 23 | 246,190 | 
(3.33) | 8 | Fiction.
Literature.
Mystery.
Suspense.
HTML: Every fall, the men of Loyalty Island sail from the Olympic Peninsula up to the Bering Sea, to spend the winter catching king crab. To Cal, Alaska remains as mythical and mysterious as Treasure Island. But while Cal is too young to accompany his father, he is old enough to know that everything depends on the fate of those boats thousands of miles north. He is also old enough to wonder about his mother's relationship with John Gaunt, owner of the fleet. Then Gaunt dies suddenly, leaving the business in the hands of his son. Soon Cal stumbles on evidence that his father may have taken measures to salvage their way of life. As winter comes on, he is forced to make a terrible choice. . … (more) |
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| Epigraph |
By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wickedest men that God ever allowed upon the sea.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island  How sour sweet music is,
When time is broke, and no proportion kept!
-William Shakespeare, Richard II | |
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When my sister was a baby, my mother would lift her from the high chair and sing, “Shake, shake, shake. Shake out the devil.” | |
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“Because when you’re out there all you can think about is back here, and when you’re back here, all you can think about is out there.” It was the most he’d ever said to me about what he did. What was out there? I knew that until I saw for myself we would never understand each other. In the meantime, we clung to what common ground we could find. My father wasn’t like most people. He wanted nothing other than exactly what he had: a family, a livelihood. For one who didn’t know him well, me for example, it was easy to take his gentleness for weakness. I only realized later that it was what made him so dangerous. Money, as my father used to say, is only energy, energy that – in this case – began as worms and mollusks on the floor of the Bering Sea. Energy that passed to the bellies of king crabs to the bellies of steel ships, to the bellies of steel banks. | |
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▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English
None ▾Book descriptions Fiction.
Literature.
Mystery.
Suspense.
HTML: Every fall, the men of Loyalty Island sail from the Olympic Peninsula up to the Bering Sea, to spend the winter catching king crab. To Cal, Alaska remains as mythical and mysterious as Treasure Island. But while Cal is too young to accompany his father, he is old enough to know that everything depends on the fate of those boats thousands of miles north. He is also old enough to wonder about his mother's relationship with John Gaunt, owner of the fleet. Then Gaunt dies suddenly, leaving the business in the hands of his son. Soon Cal stumbles on evidence that his father may have taken measures to salvage their way of life. As winter comes on, he is forced to make a terrible choice. . ▾Library descriptions No library descriptions found. ▾LibraryThing members' description |
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This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.
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All the men of Loyalty Island, a peninsula jutting into the Strait of Juan de Fuca that separates Canada and the United States, leave for the Bering Sea every season to catch crabs. While at sea, the men long for home; when home, they yearn to be back on the open ocean. This liminality pervades everyone's life on Loyalty Island.
The story begins when John Gaunt, the patriarch and owner of the fleet, dies and leaves the crab industry in the hands of his college-educated, feckless son, Richard. Richard has never even been
to sea, and his misdirected rebellion against his father threatens the men of Loyalty Island. Richard plans to sell the fleet to the Japanese, and the fishermen take matters into their own hands. Teenage Cal is left picking up the pieces after his family's way of life is shattered.The men of Loyalty Island find themselves going to immoral lengths they never thought possible to preserve their way of life, and Cal is left with a grave life-or-death secret.
When Captain Flint was Still a Good Man is salty, overcast, suspicious, brooding. The story takes place under the dark, roiling turmoil of moral dilemma and the question of how far one should go for filial duty. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, Nick Dybek has writing chops, and it shows. Unlike many Workshoppers, Dybek's writing is subtle and effective. I was drawn in and gave up every other book I was reading to devote all my eye-time to this. This story will haunt me for a long time.
Recommended for those readers who enjoyed The Shipping News, Sweetland, The Man in my Basement, and Mystic River. Check this out on flyleafunfurled.com.
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