THE COVERT BUCCANEER

In Kanter St. Amour’s historical novel, a desperate lawyer finds inspiration in an ancestor’s diary.

San Francisco, 2019: Until recently, attorney Ellie Benvenuto was a rising star at one of the city’s top law firms. Unfortunately, the responsibilities of her home life led to her unceremonious dismissal. The older of Ellie’s two young sons, Luca, was diagnosed with several disabling conditions, and Ellie—who has held primary custody of the boys since her divorce—needed more time to see to Luca’s needs than the firm was willing to give. Now, she works for the Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, where the paychecks are significantly smaller and the cases are more emotionally draining. Even with her neighbor and best friend, Anika Owens, to lean on, Ellie struggles to figure out how to provide for her family in a world that seems to despise women. When her grandfather dies, the diary of Ellie’s great-great-grandmother, Theodora Ellis, comes into her possession. Teddy (as Theodora was known) recorded her life in the 19th century, including her overland journey from Chicago to San Francisco, her marriage to Klondike miner George DeLuca, and her pioneering work as an architect, suffragist, and philanthropist. As Ellie takes on a tricky case representing an injured immigrant worker and begins a hesitant new relationship with handsome neurosurgeon Sam Varma, she follows Teddy’s chronicle, which includes details of Teddy’s (and her husband’s) polyamorous relationship with an Indigenous couple and accounts of Teddy dressing as a man in order to move in male spaces. (“He seemed to have his eyes turned upwards, looking practically at the ceiling and I realized that my hat probably does add at least a foot to my height,” recounts Teddy of a colleague responding to her attire. “He told me he had never seen a woman in a tuxedo. I said, ‘Well you have now!’”) Can Teddy’s experiences from more than a century ago help Ellie make sense of the possibilities of her own time?

The author’s descriptive prose is especially vibrant in the book’s Teddy sections, which sparkle with details of a former world. “The shaft I work currently goes 2,000 feet into the ground each day,” writes the woman of her days mining silver in Virginia City, Nevada. “I am lowered down like a rat in a bucket, straight into the mouth of the furnace. The heat is unbearable. The men work in overalls and nothing else, but I of course cannot take off my shirt.” The Ellie material is slightly duller by comparison, though Kanter St. Amour infuses her story with compellingly topical concerns about work, marginalization, and the struggles of parenthood. Though the narratives echo one another more than they directly interact, readers will draw the connections between Teddy’s eagerness to flaunt expectations for women in her own time and Ellie’s relatable struggles to lift up herself and the women around her. Thoughtful without ever losing its breezy pacing, this narrative will please readers of both contemporary and historical fiction.

A sprawling, engaging saga of two women making their ways through tumultuous American eras.

Review Posted Online: July 22, 2025