At the start of the new century (1900), Cyrus Braithwaite banishes his three sons, Nathaniel, Eliot and Drew (sixteen, fifteen and thirteen) from their family home for the three months of summer. He gives them his yacht, Double Eagle, and thirty dollars, and tells them not to return to the house, or to seek refuge with any other relations. There will be no use applying to him for help as he is closing up the house and will be out of contact.
The three boys are bewildered by their father's command, but too afraid of him to question it, or to disobey. Initially, they stick to the waters they know, but then team up with Will Terhune and decide to make a real voyage of it - to sail down the coast to Florida Keys, then on to Cuba. Surviving storms at sea, and a bar-room brawl on shore, the boys make it to Florida Keys and meet up with an old crewmate of their father's, Artemis Lowe. By this stage, Nat is determined to find and salvage the wreck that was his father's last ever salvage job - the wreck which cost Artemis his sight in one eye. Artemis can't dissuade the boys from their mission, so accompanies them, and in doing so, loses his life. Thrown into a state of shock, the boys are unable to bring themselves to move on from the wreck site, until they realise they are in the path of a hurricane. They race for sanctuary, but the Double Eagle is caught in the storm and shipwrecked off the coast of Cuba. Cyrus Braithwaite refuses to pay for his sons' passage home, and so the boys are stranded in Havana until they are able to get money from their mother's estranged aunt Judith. Through Judith they learn things about their mother, and their father, they had no idea of. Their idea of their family is changed forever.
Industry Reviews
Tom Clancy meets Tom Wolfe as newcomer Baxter crams a shifting cast of dozens into this obsessively researched revision of the American space program, the payoff for which is a manned landing on Mars. Back in the late '60s, with Kennedy dead and Nixon in the White House, the country's appetite for interplanetary exploration waned. The next step after the Apollo missions was a voyage to Mars, but NASA was pulled back. Baxter imagines what might have happened if Kennedy had lived and cajoled the nation into visiting the Red Planet. He anchors his relentlessly propulsive narrative on three characters: Gregory Dana, a scientist and concentration camp survivor who detests the German rocket scientists' affection for Big Science, preferring a more elegant (and less costly) route to Mars; Ralph Gershon, an African-American astronaut on the Mars missions; and Natalie York, a geologist who escapes two importunate lovers - one a nuclear rocket scientist, the other an astronaut - to make her awkward way Marsward. The story deftly incorporates the history of the actual Apollo missions, making the mission to Mars seem a natural outgrowth of the moon landings. Indeed, the mission ultimately ends up looking a lot like the Moon program: York, Gershon, and the third astronaut, mission commander Phil Stone, are stuffed into a rickety can for the long journey, then blasted into space. The author does a nice job of focusing on his three astronauts' individual experiences of the trip. Perhaps more dazzling than the voyage, though, is the imagined high tech that gets Americans to Mars. Baxter adroitly passes off science fiction as (detailed) science fact. Technophiles will find this endlessly appealing; sci-fi devotees will appreciate the sly Star Trek and 2001 references. For a little tragic juice, there's even a fair emulation of the Apollo 13 accident, though with decidedly different results. A wonderful, patriotic tale of lost possibility. Calling Ron Howard. (Kirkus Reviews)
