The novel weaves these narratives with dexterity and balance, and it is more than just two stories with coincidences of place, character or circumstances. The intersections or inflections suggest historical consciousness; how the past continues to impact the present. It is also a gripping read and the alternating chapters, sometimes just a page long, create a compelling momentum. I couldn’t put it down ... Kidd has created two of the most exuberantly likable characters I’ve encountered in a long time, their beauty both tempered and amplified by flashes of dark humour ... The Night Ship is immersive, vivid and immediate, teeming with sensory detail that could only have come from extensive and diligent research and told in beautifully assured prose. For days after, I felt as if I were still trying to find my land legs. The decision to frame the events of this shipwreck and its meanings through the perspectives of children at different historical moments is devastating and potent.
Jess Kidd has been carving out a genre all her own, an intricate collage of folklore, modern gothic, ghost story, historical caper and magical realism. The Night Ship, her fourth novel, brings together many of these elements ... The stories unfold in alternate chapters, linked by repeated phrases, talismans and the myth of a terrifying sea monster ... If it lacks the exuberance of Kidd’s previous novel, Things in Jars, it compensates with a stronger sense of mastery over the material and a greater depth of feeling alongside her undisputed comic talents.
Forgiving the heavy-handedness of the parallels...there’s plenty of intrigue at the start of Jess Kidd’s novel ... Yet it struggles to get beyond a low simmer ... Part of the reason the narrative feels lukewarm is to do with the novel’s form. We rarely make it through half a page before getting to a break in the text. Initially, this is pleasing ... Yet stretched over nearly 400 pages, this is testing ... Questions we might expect — about the effects of power, about the thinness of the line between order and anarchy — largely don’t come up and you’re left wishing the pot had got a little hotter.
Gil and Mayken’s stories intersect, with the novel structured in alternating chapters. Although this bifurcated architecture allows for elegant moments of mirroring across the two timelines, I also found it frustrating ... This is a shame, as the book is clearly meticulously researched, and her account of the Batavia’s foundering is among the most compelling sections ... For a novel inspired by a historical atrocity, The Night Ship is curiously insipid. The search for the Bullebak seems like unnecessary magic-realist interpolation into already fascinating fact. It never really goes anywhere ... Kidd is doubtless a talented writer and a skilled world-builder, but there was much in this novel I found wanting.
Though they are given equal air time, it’s the 17th-century voyage that compels. The world is strange, Dutch, maritime, far-flung, exotic ... The most gripping and vibrant descriptions are reserved for the 17th-century chapters, where the prose is packed and lyrical ... The Batavia is simply too epic, too fascinating and appalling, to allow room for another lesser tale, and the colourful characters of island life did not excite this reader ... The Night Ship is a work of prolific imagination, ambition and faith to history and its victims. My own qualm was with the excess of the work.
Jess Kidd’s novels have an uncommonly stunning tactile quality, plunging the reader headlong into worlds that are both recognizable and strange, where just about anything seems possible. Her fourth book, The Night Ship, is the latest example of this gift. Part historical fiction, part coming-of-age story, it’s an elegantly told tale about two young people whose lives are divided by nearly four centuries but intertwined by circumstance, fate and one famous shipwreck ... Kidd develops these parallel narratives delicately and intricately, with a precision that’s offset by the emotional intensity of her writing. In the early chapters, she makes stylistic connections between Gil and Mayken within the prose itself, then builds upon these initial associations as the story progresses. It’s an impressive juggling act ... It’s all deeply immersive. And through it all, magic always feels just around the corner.
Tension runs high in both tales, which are closely interwoven. There are whimsical, even funny moments, but physical and psychological horrors flourish in this well-researched, spellbindingly dark and folklore-infused novel as the plot advances.
Moving ... Kidd shows a keen understanding of how thin the boundary between the magic and the mundane is for children and treats their understanding of the world with seriousness and compassion. Her prose has an arresting simplicity that evokes fairy tales, and the echoes between Mayken’s and Gil’s experiences are treats for the reader to discover ... An ambitious, melancholy work of historical fiction that offers two wondrous young protagonists for the price of one.
Intriguing ... Kidd effortlessly navigates between the two time periods, highlighting the similarities between Mayken’s and Gil’s lives and the increasing dangers they face. Readers will be swept up in this fast-paced narrative.
