Young Piotr Nowak's family is caught up in the maelstrom of violence, and he is forced to flee his home. Penniless and alone, he finds passage on a ship bound for the New World. Jana Mueller loses her father to the soldiers quartering in her village. Sent away from the violence to Ireland, she starts her training as a nun and is assigned to a ship leaving for Quebec City.
Regrettably I did not have time to finish this book, but I did read enough to provide a reasonable review. As above, the premise of this story is the adventures of two young people on their way to the New World, Initially travelling in separate ships, they will eventually come together and from there we find them navigating life in Quebec, a foundling city whose trade is primarily hunting. I found this story to be well written with an impressive amount of research. The author keeps the reader engaged throughout and I enjoyed the various characters which support Piotr and Jana. I will finish the book and update the review shortly. Many thanks to Netgalley, the publishers and J Redwood for what will be a most enjoyable book.

James P. Redwood's Two Ships is a suspenseful adventure story centering on young Piotr Nowak who has fled his home in Europe and joined a crew sailing to Quebec City to make their fortune by trading for beaver furs in the New World. On another ship and in a parallel adventure, Jana Mueller, a novice nun, is traveling with another nun and two priests to establish the first Roman Catholic church in Quebec City.  Both ships cross the Atlantic around the same time. Jana's ship is grounded while sheltering from bad weather near an island close to the mainland. Her crew and fellow passengers separate, some staying with the ship and some continuing their journey by rowboat to arrange a rescue mission. Both groups are attacked, some are killed and some live to continue on to their destination. Jana and her ship's first mate are separated and begin a fraught, overland journey to Quebec City.

Shortly afterwards, Piotr's ship diverts to the island and rescue's Jana's ship's captain, the sole survivor of a raid by a pirating Swedish ship, before continuing on to Quebec City from where they begin their trading and beaver trapping enterprise.

When Jana and 2 others are chased by unfriendly natives, Piotr and his friends happen upon and rescue them from the attack. And so the parallel stories collide. 

Meanwhile, the other nun and the two priests finally arrive in Quebec and set about building the church with the assistance of the local mafia boss who earlier lost a nasty encounter with Piotr's group. As this is a suspense, I'll leave my plot description there.

This is quite an adventure story, combining escape from old, warring, imperial Europe on sailing ships, overcoming adversity on land in the New World against the environment and against other people, pitching good against evil all the while building to a dramatic conclusion back in Quebec City.

The book is well-written and the plot's tension rises and falls throughout. The parallel stories come together in a natural-feeling way and the conclusion is both suspenseful and satisfying. The primary characters are well-developed, with genuine-feeling back stories and motivations. Reading the adventure I was easily able to cheer for clearly-identifiable good people and hope for the worst for the bad ones. There were sufficient and accurate technical details to make the sailing sections and the adversities of trading and traveling in the New World around Quebec feel real. 

This book was a much needed escape from the modern world of smartphones and the internet. It was a story about courage, human endeavour, right and wrong, endurance, practicalities, and in the end, triumph over adversities and enemies.

Don't judge this book by the first six pages. The first six pages are... Well, too much, but bare with it, it gets better. Sooooo much better.
Starting on chapter 1, I was hooked. I do not recommend this book if you have a life and have things that need to get done. Just kidding. I do recommend this book. I had high expectations and it did not disappoint. It's brilliantly written and packed with action. By page 50 I'd felt like I had read half of the novel, but it was just starting. Not one single page wasted.
It tells the story of a young boy and a young girl, running from their past in Europe, they board two different ships. The boy as a sailor/merchant and the girl as a nun. They have bumpy journeys to the New World but both are headed to the same city in America: the city of Quebec. I cannot recommend this book enough, I haven't read something well written like this in a while.