TBH, my ratings of and reactions to KJ Charles books can't be trusted. I know I'm going to love them even before I start, and the familiarity and predictability of the main arcs are exactly what I read her to see. So, basically, FIVE STARS! ALL THE TIME! NO MATTER WHAT (practically)!

At first glance, especially given the tagline on the book, you expect this to be sensational, non-stop drama, anxiety-inducing and as turbulent as the waves in a storm.

This is NOT what this book delivers. The title is more important than the tagline (I don’t really get what the “obsession” was, for example. I guess the idea of spending your life at sea could be seen that way?). This is a portrait of a marriage. Both very British in their ways of approaching life, very matter-of-fact in their reporting of events. Maurice is to me quite obviously on the spectrum and depressive, and Maralyn is more brightly optimistic to the point of denial, refusing to even think of the possibility that they will not make it out of their predicament before long. This in turn makes us take in the story the way they portrayed it - yes, it was a tragedy, yes it was hectic when the sinking happened, yes they had INCREDIBLY bad luck within the first couple weeks of the ordeal. But almost immediately, they get into a routine to keep their sanity and it becomes… routine.

Being adrift in the ocean means a lot of sitting around bored for days on end. The author does a good job of hammering that in.

The being adrift was to me, the least interesting part of the whole story BECAUSE their bond made it more bearable than you would imagine. But the story of their love is touching. The two of them saw each other as no one else could, and truly Maralyn rescued him, and he says as much. The last chapters, the exploration of what life was for the two of them after their rescue, are really the best and most heartbreaking parts. And I think that’s because that’s how it is for Maurice himself. He had said that if he could go back in time and relive the days on the ocean, he would with the knowledge he’d be fine in the end. This man loved his wife so much, and beat himself up so much over every perceived failure he’d had because he wanted to be perfect for her. This hurt my little heart so much, because same man same.

So maybe I’m a little biased in my enjoyment of the end (which had me nearly sobbing) which outweighed the dryness of the rest of the book, which again, I’m choosing to see as an intentional choice of the author. It is stated that Maurice did not like how their story had been sensationalized and blown up and made a spectacle and gotten away from them. This was an attempt at making an honest report of it as much as was possible. That simple admission completely changed my opinion on the book. I deeply respect the author for choosing to not try to make this anything more than it is, and on focusing on the people more than the tragedy. That said, I am now going to also read their own accounts of it and Maurice’s letters about Maralyn because my god I love them both.

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC.

Fantastic, one of the best books I've read about the antebellum south in a very long time. Ely's focus is intentionally narrow, on the records of just six criminal cases in one Virginia county, but he uses meticulous analysis of those records and their contexts (unearthed through exploration of other archival documents) to illuminate an interracial society of great complexity and contradiction.

White men testifying on behalf of a Black man accused of raping a white woman, for example, might be more about society's view of that woman than it is a desire to protect the man in question. And, yes, a community might make disapproving noises about a white man's insistence upon treating a Black, enslaved one as his equal, but they also continue to do business with him, and interact with him as a neighbor, thus revealing far less clear lines between races and statuses than we have been taught to assume.

Based on the evidence in this book, what we know about race relations in the white supremacist old south is often wrong when it's examined in its intimate, personal details but, to Ely's great credit, none of the nuance he uncovers is ever used as it might be in other hands: to make it seems as if slavery wasn't as bad as all that, for example, or that "good masters" were admired and beloved by the humans that they owned. Instead, he shows personal interactions had nothing to do with how white people viewed the institution of slavery as a whole, and that the same white men who disapproved of their neighbor's sadistic treatment of the people he owned saw no contradictions in electing that man to office to represent them and their interests.

Ely's decades of experience in not only this field, but also the very archives in which he immersed himself to write A Terrible Intimacy seem as if they make him the perfect person to tell the stories therein. He has studied linguistics and thus can translate the language of the early 1800s for us, is a dexterous researcher who can run down missing documents (sometimes), and has such a good grounding in the study of slavery and racism that he is far too sharp to be fooled by anything that appears either simple or clear on its surface.

Just a gift of a book to anyone interested in the messy realities of American history.

Also, the audiobook is as great as the book itself, because it uses one reader for the narration and analysis, and another as the voice of the court documents, which is a brilliant approach.