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The Pirate Vortex (Elizabeth Latimer, Pirate Hunter, #1)

Deborah Cannon

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Nov 26, 2009 Werner rated it liked it

Shelves: action-heroines, science-fiction

"Calico Jack" Rackham, a Caribbean pirate hanged soon after his capture in 1720, his lover and fellow pirate Anne Bonny (b. ca. 1700) and a few other characters in this series-opening novel were real-life people, who left behind an historical record in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), by one Capt. Charles Johnson. (Johnson is otherwise unknown; many scholars surmise, as Cannon assumes in her novel, that this was a pen name used by Daniel Defoe. "Calico Jack" Rackham, a Caribbean pirate hanged soon after his capture in 1720, his lover and fellow pirate Anne Bonny (b. ca. 1700) and a few other characters in this series-opening novel were real-life people, who left behind an historical record in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), by one Capt. Charles Johnson. (Johnson is otherwise unknown; many scholars surmise, as Cannon assumes in her novel, that this was a pen name used by Daniel Defoe.) That book forms our main historical source for piracy in that era, and Cannon's portrayal here seems to be basically very faithful to the historical data as far as it goes, including the fact that we know nothing of Bonny's ultimate fate (so we're free to speculate about any descendants she may have had.... :-) ) --but that data is very embellished here, with time-traveling SF elements.

The author and I are Goodreads friends, but I checked a copy of the book out from the library where I work (so, it wasn't a review copy). My rating correctly indicates that I liked the read (and it would be three and a half stars, if Goodreads used half stars; it'll be four on Amazon). For me personally, a few factors kept it from a higher rating; but it's quite possible that other readers wouldn't weigh those as much, and would rate it higher. (In fact, several already have!)

Our heroine, Elizabeth Latimer, is an 18-year-old college student at the Univ. of Victoria near Vancouver in British Columbia, Cannon's own stamping grounds. (We're not told her exact age until a few chapters in, and many American readers wouldn't know there's a Victoria, Canada; I confused it with the Australian state of Victoria for the first couple of chapters.) Liz's mom, Tess Rackham (she kept her maiden name), formerly taught an Archaeology of Piracy class at the university; but when her husband John Latimer was lost at sea in a sailing accident four years earlier, she quit that job and went into marine salvage with her business partner, Cal Sorensen. Though her dad taught her to sail proficiently, Liz hasn't since that day. She has some issues from her dad's death and her mother's not very hands-on parenting of herself and her 14-year-old sister, and mixed feelings about her parents' obsession with pirate history: she aspires to go into business and make a prosaic career on dry land --but she's the self-styled "queen" of her school's competitive fencing program, and taking the same class her mother once taught. Then on a spring morning, two things happen: she meets mystery youth Daniel Corker, and learns that her mom is presumed lost at sea (in the Bermuda Triangle area). This sets us up for a time-traveling adventure (the cover copy, which is also the Goodreads description, gives away more of the plot).

Cannon handles language capably, without the poor grammar and diction that bedevil so many self-published authors; she's also written novels before, so this is no freshman effort. Her prose style isn't of a sort that calls attention to itself; it's straightforward, with a focus on the story. The pace is fast, and the plot exciting and eventful, with an emphasis on events, action, and snappy dialogue. YA readers affluent enough to be tech-savvy are the main target audience, and there's a fair amount of tech-talk, texting jargon, and pop culture references that this group would be more at home with than some other demographics; but older readers like myself wouldn't be lost with these either, since the context usually furnishes clues for any meaning that's essential to get. (The same goes for nautical terms, and there's not a lot of those.) Liz herself is a well-drawn, likeable (but not perfect) character, with some depth and complexity to her. As an action heroine, her fencing skills don't match those of seasoned pirates, she's not a good shot, and she's an inexperienced horsewoman; and more often than not, she needs male rescue when in jeopardy. Given her background and situation, though, this is only realistic. She's also got enough guts to fight when necessary, thinks quickly and resourcefully, and is a strong swimmer. Other characters, like Lu, Stevie, Cal and Jerrit Wang, are also quite lifelike.

Time-travel writers divide over the question of how they handle time paradoxes. Some, like Andrew Seddon (Ring of Time, take the position that you can't change the past --whatever you did there, you've already done. Cannon and others treat the past as malleable --you CAN change it, and you'd better not, or you might erase yourself and your whole bloodline! Personally, I prefer the former approach; but it wasn't a problem to accept the latter as a literary conceit. I did have some issues with the plotting. In several cases characters make decisions that aren't well explained, or that it doesn't seem like they would have made in real life, although they're necessary to move the plot the way the author wants. (And at one point, we're apparently barely off shore from Nassau, traveling by sail --but are in very short order in swimming distance of Jamaica on the far side of Cuba, a journey that would take days at least.) Liz' unexplained telepathic connections with animals, and sometimes with people (we're told at one point that she can tell if someone is lying, and Tess can psychically tell if Liz is in danger), in a plot that already demands some suspension of disbelief, for me was an element that stretched credibility a bit too much. And while CJ the parrot is cute, he and the horse Fancy display a lot more intelligence than parrots and horses really have. (Parrots imitate the sounds of human speech, but in real life they don't know what they're saying.) Some difficult operations/problems are solved too easily or coincidentally, IMO.

Considering the situations, violence here is not common or graphic. There's no explict sex, and only a couple instances of implied sex (neither involving Liz). Romance isn't really a stressed theme; Liz has always been too focused on her studies and her fencing to have much time for boys and dating (her sister Lu, at 14, is the more boy-crazy of the two). That said, she is a healthy 18-year old who's aware of attractive unattached males and appreciates their awareness of her, and who wants to someday be married. There's a triangle of speculative interest here, and there will be a kiss before the book ends; so very romance-phobic readers will want to avoid it. As for bad language, there are no f-words and very little profanity, but a fair amount of mild cussing and vulgarism; I found this within the bounds of reasonable realism and it didn't bother me, but very strict parents who censor their teens' reading will want to be aware. (I wasn't one of the latter.)

This novel completes its story arc, but it leaves a lot of unanswered questions for the sequel(s). Readers who liked this first book will probably want to continue the series; and I definitely plan to set sail with The Jade Pirate myself sometime! ...more

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