Wow! I dithered over requesting this audiobook because I wasn’t sure how engaged I’d get in a story about a female pirate from the early 1700s (interspersed with a story about a “spinster” Radcliffe professor with a famous explorer father.) Am I glad I went for this! Katherine Howe beautifully brings to life her well-researched vision of how a girl falls into the pirate life (disguised as a cabin boy), becomes ruthless, and lives to tell the tale. She does not spare us from the violence of this life and has interesting historical perspective on how pirates functioned as teams, selected leaders, divided bounty and treated their victims. Hannah Masury is a servant girl in a Boston tavern catering to sailors, miserably poor, having been placed with the tavern owner as a small girl who still had her milk teeth. Her memories of her life before are vague. She describes herself as being as lazy as possible, interacts with ease with customers and contemporaries and one would expect this is how her life will go forever. How she becomes a pirate, while disguising her gender is best learned for yourself, but it’s a totally engaging story.
We first learn about Hannah and her adventures through a journal/memoir she supposedly self-published that was found by a freshman student taking a course from Marian Beresford. Dr. Beresford is best known as her father’s daughter. He is a great explorer, based out of NY City. When her student, Kay, brings her the journal, there’s a tantalizing hint that an unfound treasure remains buried and findable 200 years later. It is the beginning of the depression. Marian’s desire to make her own mark is keen. Is the journal real? Is it worth pursuing the treasure? Is there a treasure? Will her father’s club (an Explorer’s Club) finance them?) Pages are missing from the manuscript. Does that matter? Can’t tell you as there would be spoilers.
Seriously: I read this via audiobook. The narrator was great! But also, I usually read audiobooks over a period of time, Maybe at the pace of 2-3 hours a week. I had to listen to this to the very end one Saturday, after trying to stick to my usual pattern and I had to read it without doing other things like cleaning house. It was really great. Highly recommend as entertaining fiction with some fun twists and turns and a set of interesting characters in 2 different periods.
They Called me Bookworm 