Swashbuckling adventure
No prizes for guessing what sort of novel lies behind the rather unoriginal title of Celia Rees' latest offering, Pirates! That's correct, it's about pirates.
But there is one surprise in store: the story concerns female pirates who can buckle a swash and flash a sword as good as any male pirate searching the high seas for treasure and adventure.
At the start of the 18th century in England, daughters in rich families had their lives mapped out for them. They stayed at home, preparing themselves for the day when a wealthy gentleman came to call to ask for their hand in marriage.
Nancy Kington is the only daughter of a rich sugar merchant in the port of Bristol and she knows exactly what sort of future lies ahead of her.
But she is wrong. When her father dies, Nancy, 16, has to travel to the family sugar plantation in Jamaica to help run the business with her brothers. From the moment she sets foot on the ship that takes her away from her oppressive life in England, Nancy senses that there is adventure in the air.
Across the ocean, on the other side of the world, the Kington plantation operates with the hard labour of slaves from Africa. One young slave, Minerva Sharpe, dreams of escaping her cruel life and finding freedom.
When Nancy arrives in Jamaica, she discovers that she has been shipped out there to marry for the good of the family business.
Nancy and Minerva are both trapped in different circumstances. They meet and immediately become friends, a very dangerous thing to do.
One night, Nancy is driven to commit murder in order to rescue her new friend from an abusive plantation manager. The two girls become fugitives and flee the plantation. Dressed in disguise, the pair join the crew of a ship which they soon discover is a pirate vessel.
Now the swashbuckling begins and the novel is nearly impossible to put down after a slow build-up. This is what we have been waiting for and everything we expect is here: fights, adventure, romance and villainy.
The females in Pirates! are not the simpering, secondary characters that are sometimes found in adventure stories. They take on the men at their own game, and, of course, win the personal treasures they deserve at the end of the story.
Rees is a classy writer who has a definite knack in recreating the past with enough colour, excitement and thrills to satisfy demanding readers who want a well-told, page-turning story.
Pirates!
By Celia Rees
Published by Bloomsbury
ISBN 0 7475 6469 8
