Mommy Brain

I just finished listening to Pirates! by Celia Rees, a YA novel I checked out on audiobook from our library. It was a very entertaining listen.

Pirates! tells the tale of Nancy Kington and Minerva Sharpe, a plantation owner’s daughter and a slave, thrown together by fate and gone “on the account” as pirates.

Rees deals honestly with the slave trade, as well as the limits and oppression piled on women of the early 1700s. Nancy is a sixteen-year-old girl who fears the fate her brothers have chosen for her. An instant decision to save her slave-girl from rape changes the course of her life forever. She runs away with two female slaves to the maroons, escaped slaves living in the wilderness of Jamaica.

Sought by the man her brothers want her to marry, Nancy joins a pirate ship, and her companion and former slave Minerva accompanies her. Minerva is especially suited to the life of a pirate, and Nancy quickly adapts her feminine, aristocratic sensitivities to life as a thief.

Nancy tells the story in first person, and as I listened I felt what she was feeling and saw what she was seeing. Rees is a talented author and I will be looking for more of her work.

The YA designation is deserved, and the notation on the Amazon page that this is appropriate for grades 6-9 is a bare minimum for the age restriction. Rees is brutal in her honesty of the horrors of slavery and murder, so use your own judgment in recommending this to any young girls. I would say high school age would be appropriate, and possibly junior high girls, depending on their maturity and how much you wish to shelter them.