Reviews

DNF at about 70%.

I love the idea of this book. I adore the cover and the title. I really wanted this to be good, and some small parts of it were okay. You can tell the author did copious amounts of research.

Unfortunately it comes out reading like a history essay padded out into book length. Seriously, there is so much padding - possibly because the source material seems to be sadly quite sparse. There's too much conjecture in this "nonfiction" book for my liking - explorations of theories that the author prefaces by stating outright that she has no evidence to back them up, whole sections on fictional characters that fit into the category of "Pirate Women," and fanciful detours into "this probably didn't happen, but wouldn't it be cool if it had?" Nope. If you're going to spin theories about what could have happened, you better have some truly compelling evidence to go with them. I didn't find much of that, and what supporting evidence she did give was pretty thin.

There were some very interesting facts provided, and I did learn a lot about some formidable women I'd never heard of before, but the book also lacked the sense of fun that the cover and title seem to suggest. You'd learn just as much from a well-curated selection of Wikipedia articles. I found it interesting enough that I can't justify a one-star rating, but just barely.