Montaro Caine by Sidney Poitier: book review

Montaro Caine (2013) is a futuristic novel written by actor and director Sidney Poitier (1927-2022), known for the movies Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967) and In the Heat of the Night (1967).

Montaro Caine is the Chief Executive Officer of the Fitzer Chemical Corporation, a New York mining company. He started Fitzer when he was a teenager, and now it was collapsing after a mining disaster and economic setbacks. He lives with his wife Cecilia and their teenage daughter, with teenage issues. Montaro is losing control of his company and his family.

When he was eight years old, his father gave him a mysterious hand-carved wooden object made by Luther, a 14-year-old boy. It was like a ship, which Luther called the Seventh Ship. Montaro still had this wooden object. In his office, there is a couple have a coin-like object, made of an unknown metal, found in the hand of a baby girl, and Montaro knows instantly that it is precious and could be a means of saving his company from collapse. He had seen a similar object 26 years earlier, when he was a metallurgy student.

Both objects – the wooden ship and the coin – and both people – Luther and the unknown coin owner – are brought together.

Matthew Perch, a reclusive medicine man on a Caribbean island, knows why Montaro, the boy and the girl – now adults – are brought together after so many years, and the significance of these objects to Montaro’s future, and the future of the world. What does this have to do with Montaro’s father, who died when Montaro was eight years old, and his grandfather Philip Caine who will be ninety-nine?

One of the coins – the metals – has been stolen. It has something to do with the Seventh Ship and Montaro – when Luther informs Montaro that the Seventh Ship is on its way to Earth. It is coming to get information. Montaro wonders where the other coins are, who has them, and who controls them? Why is there an urgency to find them? What is the potential of each coin, for the owner, and for plant Earth?

Are readers having difficulty understanding this review? Perhaps it’s because the novel’s plot is complex and complicated with plots and sub-plots. Influenced by his friend cosmologist Carl Sagan, Sidney Poitier’s mystery, adventure, medicine story is a mixture of science and mysticism that provides readers with a gentle, but rich, and very imaginative story full of suspense and intrigue.

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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