review; steel

Steel
by Carrie Vaughn

Sixteen-year-old Jill has fought in dozens of fencing tournaments, but she has never held a sharpened blade. When she finds a corroded sword piece on a Caribbean beach, she is instantly intrigued and pockets it as her own personal treasure.

The broken tip holds secrets, though, and it transports Jill through time to the deck of a pirate ship. Stranded in the past and surrounded by strangers, she is forced to sign on as crew. But a pirate’s life is bloody and brief, and as Jill learns about the dark magic that brought her there, she forms a desperate scheme to get home—one that risks everything in a duel to the death with a villainous pirate captain.

Review:

I stumbled across this book when I was browsing the library some weeks ago, and was instantly fascinated by the cover and the blurb on the back of the book. It promised a strong-willed heroine, sword-fighting, mystery and pirates.

PIRATES.

What is not to love about the idea?

It promised to be intriguing and exciting and fun. Jill is a teenage girl who is completely focused on her fencing, who manages to somehow end up in the past during a family holiday to the Bahamas, on a pirate ship. I don’t know if it was the premise (a girl being sent to the unfamiliar and trying to find her way home – a premise I wrote for my final year project actually) or just the style of writing, but as much as the story was intriguing, I could not get into it.

The thing is, despite the very interesting characters and the fascinating world of pirates, the novel was very slow moving. It was decently written, the language was clear and the people were well-developed – but the story moved really slowly and I could not read more than one or two chapters at a time. The story only really picked up in the last four or five chapters, which I finished in a night and wondered why the entire novel had not been like that.

It took me longer than I expected to finish the novel, but it was pretty good. Not something I would read again, but fans of the fantasy genre would enjoy it.