Review – Pirates! by Celia Rees (4/5 stars)

I picked up this book because I had be seeing it on shelves for ages and was curious. It ended up being a pretty darn good book.

This book tells the story of a young girl, Nancy, who is the daughter to a sugar plantation owner. When Nancy’s father dies. Nancy is spirited away by her brothers to live on their sugar plantation in Jamaica. Upon her arrival she finds that she has been promised to a horrible man for marriage. Certain circumstances come about and Nancy ends up fleeing for her life and signing up to be serve as a pirate on a pirate ship. The majority of the book is spent on her adventures.

This was a very good book. The writing style is very straight forward, the whole book is from Nancy’s perspective. The plot moves slowly at the beginning with the the first third of the book telling about how Nancy and Minerva got onto the pirate ship. The pace picks up from there and hurtles from adventure to adventure. It was a thoroughly enjoyable read.

I have one small complaint about the book and that was that it dealt with pirates from a very romantic point of view; the violence of a pirate’s lifestyle is somewhat muted. I think young girls would have been hard pressed to serve as women on a pirate ship in reality. Of course, this isn’t reality, it’s just a very good story that definitely sways toward fantasy. It reminded me a lot of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie. It is a very solid young adult novel.

I liked the book and will be checking out more books by this author.