Right from the beginning we are aware we follow an adept, clever, confident girl, a captain of her own crew, a skilled fighter, and a scheming opportunist. As daughter of the pirate king, she agrees to be taken captive and sneakily hunt down a piece of an important, life-changing map. Authors present characters as flawed individuals and readers accept them or not. The same way we accept vampires or gangsters, thieves or vikings.

How can we reconcile that?Įasily, actually. What’s tricky is a situation in which the pirate character is the protagonist, and readers are asked to identify with him or her, and we all know pirates loot, ravage and destroy. This year I created a ‘nautical’ shelf on GR to accommodate a growing number of books where characters live life on oceans or rivers, and villains in those books are often a variation of a pirate character. However, pirates are present in films, TV shows as well as books, and it’s difficult to completely ignore their presence. I certainly haven’t forgotten that explanation, and so every time I see a pirate book, I am much more cautious and careful.

It was a discussion mostly around picture book depictions, and how we continue to create pretty, fanciful pirate books, and how offensive this is. That to create a romanticised view of them was to do a disservice to people who are robbed, kidnapped or worse by these opportunists. The argument was based on the fact that today, pirates still exist, and the trauma they cause is real and horrifying.

I remember a judging panel I was once on, where another judge confronted us all with a strong anti-pirate stance.

Books about pirates do cause me some consternation. Daughter of the Pirate King is one such book, and I am pleased that it lived up to my expectations.Ī caveat of sorts. But now I have more time to read for myself, I hope to add books that have been on my to-be-read list for a while, ones that I have heard about and have been keen to read. The other advanced copies I read are reviewed elsewhere. Most of the books I review here are ones I receive from Netgalley. Daughter of the Pirate King by Tricia Levenseller

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