Leah Angstman's OUT FRONT THE FOLLOWING SEA

I don't always immediately wish a novel I've been reading to be made into a Major Motion Picture, or even a minor one, but when I do, I really, really do! Such is the case here: Leah Angstman's debut novel, Out Front the Following Sea, set in an America so early they're still bickering over the borders of the 13 colonies, has everything anyone would want from a fun historical romp: kissing, fighting, accusations of witchcraft, more fighting, desperate battles against nature at her worst, bravery and more kissing! 

Furthermore, I demand that Julia Garner dye her hair auburn red and be cast immediately as Angstman's amazing heroine, Ruth Miner, and I swear it's not totally because Garner has achieved fame playing another character named Ruth, that's just a coincidence. But if you love Ruth Langmore in Ozark, imagine her in an adventurous historical romance that up until now we've just had to re-read Louis L'Amour's Sackett and Chantry novels to get -- and in which she is absolutely the hero of the tale.

I'm serious. To call Ruth Miner plucky would be to sell her short. She could go toe to toe with anybody from the Aubrey/Maturin books (though this is set about a century before Jack and Stephen take to the seas), with anybody from the Sackett novels, and very possibly not even get singed, because even the officers in His Majesty's Royal Navy were still pretty superstitious, except for Maturin. Maturin would just fall in love with her, though. Diana who?

As our story begins to unfold, 16-year-old Ruth Miner is living on the bitter edge of starvation or freezing to death, for all that once upon a time her family was respected in the small Dutch-settled coast of what would become New Jersey. Her parents are dead (we don't find out how or why until much later) and she is desperately trying to keep herself and an ailing grandmother alive with less than no help from the community in which she grew up, because they all think she's a witch. No fool, she, she winds up trading on this reputation to get passage on a cargo ship that's soon to make a stop where she's lived her whole life -- by threatening to call down the mother of all curses on the customs officer who is not willing to let her book herself as freight (because passenger berths are way beyond her means).

No sooner is she on board ship than she is causing trouble there, too; the first mate is an old family friend who feels an unspecified sense of obligation to her and also may have a crush; ruthlessly (wink) she uses his feelings against him to keep her safe on a ship full of filthy louts who seem to think that an unmarried woman on board ship is basically community property. The first mate, Owen Townsend, while charming and handsome as the dickens, is barely tolerated on board himself because he is half-French at a time when the mother nations of England and France are at war and their conflicts threaten to spill over into their colonies; even knowing a few words of the French language or possessing books written in French is kind of against the law. Childhood friends who are well aware of the liabilities they pose to one another, they nonetheless team up in the struggle to survive the outbreak of what we know as the French and Indian War.

Along the way, Ruth bullies the local land office in the Connecticut village where she debarks into letting her have an unpromising piece of marsh land abutting the property of the kindly old couple who take her in and have her toiling to fence out, stone by stone. Soon she's not only getting the fence built but also building a house for herself, growing a few crops in her marsh, and has begun a tentative but promising friendship with a semi-outcast member of the remnants of the Pequod nation, whose land the white settlers have, of course, appropriated from them at gunpoint.

It all sounds a bit far-fetched and Mary Sue-ish, doesn't it? But trust me, you're not going to care. This book gallops along at a breathtaking pace and it's all fascinating and fun. Plus, Angstrom, whom I believe is a professional historian by trade, knows her way around a Dutch-style fluyt and writes a mean combat scene aboard one:

He leaped onto the3 fallen foremast and felt the throb in his thigh, then swooped from above with his dagger downward, driving it between a pirate's shoulderblades.* The pirate went down without seeing what hit him. Own retracted the blade and swiped it across the neck of the next advancing attacker, before stepping to thte side of the man's descending sword, leaving the falling edge to lodge itself into the planks of the deck. the opponent fell forward, his throat opening like a sluice gate, a stream of crimson onto the floorboards.

I mean, who doesn't want to see that on the big screen? Or at least your big TV in the rumpus room?

Seriously, it's been a while since I had this much plain old fun reading a novel. And there's room for a sequel, right? Right??? Please?

I mean, how many freaking Sackett novels got cranked out over the years? And the women were mostly just trophies in those. In the Ruth and Owen adventures, both of them get to be badasses. 

*Of course there are pirates.