Book Report: Cross Current by Christine Kling

Seychelle Sullivan on her way to tow and then pump water off Miss Agnes, a Bahamian Cruiser, gets waylaid by a big sport fisherman and alters her course so that it could pass in front of her tub. As she is trying to get on course, she sights something which peaks her curiosity. Upon investigation, she finds a little boat with a little girl and a bloated body of a woman floating face down next to the child. She immediately connects with the little girl and desires to protect and help her. She tows the boat back, calls her friend Jeannie Black, who is also a lawyer, to assess the situation before notifying the authorities about the whole incident. She stalls reporting when she finds them because she knew that the authorities would not be sympathetic to the plight of the little girl. Solange, the little girl, is taken to the hospital since she is not in a healthy condition. However, Solange is attacked in the hospital and appears lifeless like a zombie. This opens up a wave of voodoo or as the Haitian calls it vedou. Christine battles with the forces of good and evil over Solange’s life so as to fulfill a promise she had given to the child, to find her father.

Christine discovers that Joe D’Angelo is Solange’s father and a smuggler of child slaves known as the Restavek even though he is an ex-cop. And that Celeste is Solange’s mother. And so Christine bursts the ring of Restavek smugglers and reunites Solange with her mother, and also clears Red’s, her father, name in the whole setup.

My Analysis

Secheyelle, the heroine in the novel, has a complex personality and this makes her relatable to the reader of the book. From the onset of the novel, one immediately understands that she connects easily with people, especially with children. She is disturbed when terrible things happens to them, for example when talking about Miss Agnes in page three, she says “I heard six people drowned….two of them were children, little girls, ages ten and twelve….I hope they catch the bastards and charge them with murder.” One can virtually hear the pain in her voice as she said those words. Then she finds Solange and refuses to allow her suffer the fate of being deported. She goes against all odds to find Solange’s mother and father so that the officials would have no reason to take her back to Haiti.

However, even though she connects easily with people, she is scared and wary of commitments to them. She breaks off with B.J when she realizes that they just might be heading to the altar and a possible future with a bunch of kids. She tries not to get too personal with Solange because she felt Solange needed a mother and that she, Seychelle, is not ready nor fit to be somebody’s mother. Even though she keeps them around and connects and aches for them, she protects her heart from them so it does not get crushed.

She however realizes that there is no way one can effectively lock one’s heart from the people one interacts with. When she is left to die in the open sea by Joe, she reflects on her life and realizes just how much she is in love with B.J and that it was her stubbornness that stopped her from being with him. And when Solange is safely reunited with her mother Celeste, she realizes also that she loved that little girl and that she is going to miss her. Finally she could let break down the wall and participate in love, both with B.J and Solange.

The Author

According to inKlings.com, the official website of the author, Christine Kling was born in Missoula, Montana, and is the middle child with two siblings, a brother and a sister. She “grew up in Southern California in the 1960's which meant that beaches and water were a constant part of her life”, and has “spent more than twenty years on and around boats and has cruised the waters of the North and South Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean” (inKling.com, Cross Current). She presently lives on her boat, Talespinner, in Fort Lauderdale.

Christine attended Florida International University in Miami, where she received her M.F.A in creative writing. During her college days, she travelled to France and spent a year as a foreign exchange student; there she found her love for adventure and travelling.

She started writing Surface Tension, the first book in the Seychelle Sullivan series when she was on vacation with her family in 1993. She, however, started writing the next book in the series, Cross Current, before the first book was published since “it takes a year to a year and a half from finishing a book till when the book is published and in bookstores” (interview with her, on Friday, the 19th of November). Currently, she has four books in the Seychelle Sullivan series, with the last book in the series, Wreckers' Key, published in 2007. She is however presently polishing a draft of a book that she spent four years writing about, which is totally different from her former books.

I must add, Christine Kling is an interesting woman who having engaged the five of us who attended the interview for forty-five minutes, left us with no doubt that we wanted to read the remaining of Seychelle’s adventures, and any other fictional world that Christine might create in the future.