Tim Powers

Jack Shandy, bookkeeper and puppeteer, is the least likely man to get mixed up with pirates. Yet, on his way to seek revenge against his rich uncle for cheating his now-dead father of an inheritance, he is kidnapped by zombie pirates and taken into adventures, misadventures and lands filled with voodoo.

On Stranger Tides

Sarah Sammis

Zombie pirates.

http://www.pussreboots.pair.com/blog/...

Shortlisted for the World Fantasy Award Shortlisted for the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel 1718: Puppeteer John Chandagnac has set sail for Jamaica to recover his stolen inheritance, when his ship is seized by pirates. Offered the choice to join the crew, or be killed where he stands, he decides that a pirate's life is better than none at all. Now known as Jack Shandy, this apprentice buccaneer soon learns to handle a mainsail and wield a cutlass - only to discover he is now a subject of a Caribbean pirate empire ruled by one Edward Thatch, better known as Blackbeard. A practitioner of voodoo, Blackbeard is building an army of the living and the dead, to voyage together to search for the ultimate prize: the legendary Fountain of Youth.

altlovesbooks

This was a pretty fun pirate romp that kept me engaged. I listened to this as an audiobook, and highly recommend doing so as the narrator made it all the better. It doesn't have the deepest of plots, and it's obviously far fetched, but it's a pirate book, and a damn good one at that. Highly recommend for pirate fans.

This book has been sitting in my to-read pile since seventh grade, when my English teacher sat next to me on a plane out to wherever we were visiting for a school retreat trip. He was reading this book. I asked him about it, and he said it was about pirates and told me to mind my own business.

So yeah, it's been a long wait. But I've finally read it! 

It was neither overwhelming nor underwhelming, neither incredibly avant-garde nor too comfortably formulaic. Jack Shandy made for an enjoyable protagonist, though it gets kind of muddled 2/3 of the way through. The pacing felt too slow for the kind of blow-by-blow action-adventure book it's trying to be.

It's too bad the female character (there was only one of note, I guess there was Anne but she's not that important) was useless. The romantic subplot felt too one-sided and like too much of an afterthought to engage the reader.

So I guess it was okay.

Joao Freitas

Marie

Michael Cowell

Elisabetta

In 1718, John Chandagnac, a bookkeeper and puppeteer, unwittingly sails into the company of Blackbeard the pirate, encounters zombie-crewed wrecks, and is caught up in a search for the Fountain of Youth.

On Stranger Tides

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