Under the Jolly Roger
(The Bloody Jack Adventures, Book 3)
L. A. Meyer
Harcourt
Fiction, YA Adventure/Historical Fiction
**** (Good)
DESCRIPTION: Mary "Jacky" Faber has come a long way from her days as an orphaned girl scraping a living off the streets of London. Since then, she's lived as a ship's boy aboard a British sailing vessel, traveled halfway around the world, survived pirates and stranding... and, along the way, fell in Deepest and Truest Love with the highborn James Emerson Fletcher. Once her gender was revealed, Jacky spent a disastrous term at a private finishing school for young ladies in Boston... a stay that ended with her name well-known among the local rabble-rousers and police, and with half the school in flames.
Stepping off a whaler (where she'd booked passage as companion to a captain's wife), Mary finds herself once again in London... and, here, her celebrity as the roguish "Bloody" Jack precedes her by way of a book published by a friend from Boston. This cannot bode well for her planned surprise reunion with James, whose family has actively discouraged their courtship, but Mary isn't one to back down from a challenge. Soon, she's swept up in another wild adventure as her impulsive nature and good intentions land her in one scrape after another, from society misunderstandings to brutal press gangs and back to the high seas with her own ship, a Letter of Marque... and a price on her head.
REVIEW: Sometimes, you just want a good adventure yarn with larger-than-life characters and near-nonstop action. The Bloody Jack series is an excellent choice for those times. This book, the third installment in the ongoing series, carries the tale back to the world of pirates and sailing ships, where Mary/Jacky has always seemed to belong. Though mostly a rollicking yarn, she is no perfect angel of a heroine, and her habit of leaping before she looks causes her at least as much trouble as it gets her out of. As she starts encountering old friends and enemies, some of those spur-of-the-moment actions come back to haunt her. Even at her lowest points, though, she always keeps an eye out for opportunities for freedom, a little money, or learning something new to help her through future potential problems. Her courtship with James continues to linger, mostly on the back burner, but at least in this book he starts showing some signs of being a worthy suitor for the famous "Bloody" Jack; in the previous installment, he proved remarkably obtuse, to the point where I wondered what Mary ever saw in the twit. The ending sees her on her way to her next adventure with yet more touched lives and wanton destruction floating in her wake. I expect I'll read the fourth book in the series, at least.
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