Steel by Carrie Vaughn
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Sixteen-year-old Jill has fought in dozens of fencing tournaments, but she has never held a sharpened blade. When she finds a corroded sword piece on a Caribbean beach, she is instantly intrigued and pockets it as her own personal treasure.
The broken tip holds secrets, though, and it transports Jill through time to the deck of a pirate ship. Stranded in the past and surrounded by strangers, she is forced to sign on as crew. But a pirate’s life is bloody and brief, and as Jill learns about the dark magic that brought her there, she forms a desperate scheme to get home—one that risks everything in a duel to the death with a villainous pirate captain.
Warnings: mention of child sacrifice, loss of child
Steel is more of a character development story than a pirate story, to be honest. It’s sort of a time travel fantasy in which a modern day girl (who is a fencer) gets transported some 300-odd years ago to a pirate ship. She learns life lessons etc, defeats the villain and gets back, the end.
Jill falls off a boat on a vacation (where she has been sulking about losing a qualifying competition) and travels to where a broken piece of a rapier (which she had found on the beach earlier) came from. Now, the story doesn’t go into how that magic worked or what the magic of the rapier itself was, other than a vague description of it being able to make a person appear more leader-ly? Yeah, the backstory for the magic was definitely lacking in this one, and it served only to propel the plot by having our girl get transported. By some means. Now, Jill’s life on the pirate ship is not all swashbuckling adventure – it is hard labor, and the book goes into much detail depicting how life would be during that time. Which going by my limited knowledge of pirate life in the 18th century, is more accurate than say, the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (then again, Disney was never concerned with historical accuracy, is it?) but is still pretty tame by what you would expect. I mean, this is a YA novel after all. Heaven forbid someone gets killed. (Okay, I’m being a bit salty here but I also understand that this book was published like 7 years ago and publishers were having different ideas at that time)
Now, while the world-building of the pirate life is good, ultimately the plot is actually lacklustre. There is development for Jill, as she learns there are more bigger things in life than being upset over being fourth-best, and how much she loves fencing and how that is worth more than any qualifying competition. But even after she kind of builds a life there on the pirate ship (they do sail for some weeks), she is not attached to them. Jill lucks out when her captain is the fearsome but good Captain Cooper, who is a female captain yes, and she is badass (Cooper, not Jill). Cooper is on a mission to find another pirate who Wronged her and she and her crew are on the path for revenge, while also saving slaves in the meantime. I wish there was more build-up to the captain taking her under her wing other than just that she imagined her as her lost daughter, but well, this was a short book, and there was a villain to catch and exact revenge on. But, some of you will also be glad to know that there is no romance arc in this novel! I mean, there is a guy called Henry and they are sort of flirty with each other, but it doesn’t exactly go anywhere and I was glad that it didn’t go down the ‘how can I leave him’ angst kind of route.
Shortly, nice pirate novel, needed more adventure, but you might like reading it for a change.
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