Steel by Carrie Vaughn

[meganbmoore]

This book is clearly written for every girl who watched an Errol Flynn movie when young and went "I want to be Errol Flynn when I grow up. Except a girl version who gets to do all these things. And only the movie Errol Flynn, not the real guy."


Jill is a modern teen whose sport of choice is fencing. She wants to be Errol Flyyn when she grows up. Except a girl version who gets to do all these things. And only the movie Errol Flynn, not the real guy. (Apparently, her parents never let her see Cutthroat Island. A serious gap in her education, there.) After a defeat at a tournament caused by a half-second hesitation, her family goes on vacation in the caribbean, where she finds part of a pirate sword that sends her back to the early 18th century when she's swept overboard in a storm. Where she ends up serving under (fictional) pirate queen Marjory Cooper (though Mary Read and Anne Bonny show up too, not to mention Grandy Nanny) who is hunting the pirate who owns the rest of the sword Jill found.


The pirates are darker and more realistic than your average teen and Hollywood fare, and there's a bit more detail than normal about the actual chores involved in life at sea (I don't think I've encountered something before that actually took the time to explain what scrubbing the deck entailed and why it was done) and it actually remembers that not all or even most of the people in the Caribbean in the early 1800s were white.


Of course, Cooper and most of her crew are at least somewhat nicified since the modern reader is supposed to like them, but not outrageously so. There's also a cute pirate love interest, but he doesn't get in the way and Jill doesn't let hormones get in the way of her decisionmaking, and he's nicely non-emo and pretty helpful.


The chapters also use fencing terms as titles, and Vaughn has a helpful glossary of them in back.


It's not "Best thing ever!" or amazingly outstanding, but if you ever wanted more girls in your swashbucklers and/or like fencing, you'd probably like this.