Between Two Fires

John Paul Jones #2

by Nicholas Nicastro

Commanding his small, bitterly divided squadron deep into enemy waters, John Paul Jones must master both the opposition and himself as he joins the battle that will seal his fame. Meanwhile, his former comrade John Severence confronts another, more ominous brand of warfare on the frontiers of colonial New York. Both men are transformed in the crucible of combat, courage, and wartime folly.

Genres: Fiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2002

About the author

Nicholas Nicastro was born in Astoria, New York in 1963. His education includes a B.A. in English from Cornell University (1985), an M.F.A. in filmmaking from New York University (1991), an M.A. in archaeology and a Ph.D in psychology from Cornell (1996 and 2003). He has also worked as a film critic, a hospital orderly, a newspaper reporter, a library archivist, a college lecturer in anthropology and psychology, an animal behaviorist, and an advertising salesman. His writings include short fiction, travel and science articles in such publications as "The New York Times", "The New York Observer", "Film Comment", and "The International Herald Tribune". His books have been published by Penguin, St. Martin's, and HarperCollins.

Reviews

[Curtiss · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second book in Nicastro's novelizations of the career of Captain John Paul Jones of the fledgling American Navy. This one was more interesting than the first for its land-bound digression into General John Sullivan's campaign against the Iroquois, in which Captain Severance suposedly participated.

Half of the novel is narrated by Severance, the other half is narrated by a half-white, half-Iroquois, captive who participated as a landsman volunteer durting the climactic battle of John Paul Jones' career, the contest between the U.S.S. Bon Homme Richard and H.M.S. Serapis. Christened Joseph "Between Two Fires" for having been born between two council fires, this second narrator not only lends his name to Nicastro's book but is also credited with delivering the grenade onto Serapis' main gundeck whose explosion precipitated Captain Pearson of the Serapis' surrender. After the battle, Joseph returns to the ruins of his village in the aftermath of Sullivan's march and encounters Severance, with tragic results.

The real-life grenade thrower was a Scots-American sailor named William Hamilton, as Nicastro takes care to note in his afterward.

Nicastro's characters, new and old, remain unsavory and unsympathetic, and in some cases brutal and barbaric. His description of the Iroquois culture and reaction the white culture is interesting, as is his tale of the origin of the expression "OK", from the Choctaw expression with the same meaning.

[Deborah Bodansky]

I purchased this book accidentally a few months ago because it had the same title as a book I was reading for my book club, and ended up reading it when curiosity got the better of me (I cannot leave a book unread when I have it in my house, it's one of my fatal flaws). I actually ended up liking this more than the "correct" Between Two Fires, though that wasn't a hard bar to clear. This one is a historical fiction novel about the Revolutionary War, the second installment in a duology (?) centering on a naval general named John Paul Jones. (Whose character was apparently based on a real person! He served with the Russian military after the Revolutionary War ... and got discharged therefrom for raping a 10-year-old girl, I learned, independently of the book, when I was almost done with it. Charming protagonist for a historical fiction novel, to be sure.) Confusingly, though, John Paul Jones does not appear to be the protagonist of this book -- that role is played by a man named Severence who had dealings with Jones in the first book, one I have not read. Though about half the plot is devoted to Jones's captaincy of a ship called the Bon Homme Richard and a legendary naval battle he won on that ship, which was well-described and which I read about with interest, I didn't find his character or story especially compelling and found much more of interest in Severence's account of serving under Sullivan in a campaign against British-aligned Native American tribes. This part of the book was exceptionally well-done -- illuminating in its stark portrayal of the atrocities the Revolutionary army committed against Native Americans, and a fantastically executed example of an unreliable narrator, as the style and content of the letters Severence writes to a woman he is courting not only gives a hint as to his true motives but also to parts of the truth that he tries to conceal. I wouldn't mind reading the prequel.