Friday, August 23, 2024

The Final Curse of Ophelia Cray, by Christine Calella

When your mother is a feared and hated pirate and reputed witch, it's hard to keep a low profile.  Raised by her father, Ophelia has borne not only her mother's name, but the weight of her mother's notoriety.  Hated by the townspeople, Ophelia longs to run away from her small island and sail the seas -- not as a pirate like her mother, but as a sailor in the Royal Navy.  When her bloodline prevents her from enlisting, she presents herself as her half-sister Betsy and joins on.  Her sister is a helpless homebody and unlikely to be noticed by anyone, or so Ophelia thinks.  But when Ophelia slips away, Betsy surprises everyone by racing off to sea after her.

And soon, the best laid plans go astray as a set of curses cast by Ophelia's mother at the gallows come to pass.  Pirates, sword fights, sunken ships, gold, betrayals and doublecrosses, and endless adventure unfurl over the next 300+ pages of this frenetic adventure.  The cast is huge (although so is the body count) and keeping track of who is on whose side at any point in time is an ordeal, but if you let the story just take you along you are guaranteed a good ride.  It's not every YA novel that lets the heroine duel and get whipped in the first hundred pages so don't imagine that this is much of a "feelings" book or particularly focused on character development. But if pirates are your thing, there's plenty of that to go round here.

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