Sam Silver, Undercover Pirate by Jan Burchett & Sara Vogler

You know, the lovely thing about widening the scope of my reviewing into younger fiction is that I get a chance to review fun, silly, and as the blurb says, swashbuckling stuff like the first two volumes of the Sam Silver series: Skeleton Island, and the Ghost Ship.

                        

Now, these two books have been out for a few months, but what better time, with Christmas almost upon us and stocking fillers to still find, than to tell you about them?

Sam's story kicks off with Skeleton Island. He's a totally normally kid, living in Backwater Bay above his mum and dad's fish and chip shop, and his room is full of the normal assortment of rubbish. But at the beginning of the book he's just found a new piece of junk: an old bottle with what looks like a note inside. Of course, Sam, is immediately convinced that the note is from some castaway, desperate to be rescued and that, as the resucer, Sam will become rich and famous overnight. So, he's somewhat dismayed to find that the note was written in 1705, because clearly that makes the writer too old to be rescued!

But fear not. The note is, of course, from a pirate, with instructions, of sorts, to find his hidden treasure, and it's signed by one Joseph Silver, captain of the Sea Wolf. Sam know immediately what this means. His name is Silver too. So he's decended from a pirate. What could be better? Actually becoming a pirate, of course, and that is precisely what happens when Sam tries to clean the dirty old coin that fell out of the bottle with the note. One minute he is standing in his bedroom, the smell of fried fish wafting up the stairs, and the next minute he is cowering in the hold of a ship with a knife-wielding pirate heading straight at him and threatening to make him walk the plank.

The Silver name proves to be his salvation and once Sam explains to his new found pirate friends about the treasure, it's a non-stop action as they go about finding and securing the loot. On the way, there's lots of fun to be had with Sam's continual use of modern terms: there's a nice interchange about PE, which only gets worse when Sam tries to explain the term by reference to football, for example. And there's lots of typical pirate stuff too: sea battles, storms, jagged rocks and of course, a skeleton on an island. Sam even gets to make a couple of friends in the form of Fernando, the pirate who originally found him, and Charlie, a stowaway who's trying to escape an evil step-father.

In The Ghost Ship, Sam finds himself back with his old pirate friends who have spent all the money from Joseph Silver's hoard and are now in desperate need of funds again. So, they head off on the pirate adventures once more,this time taking on a ghost ship which has been raiding all the other ships in the area.

There are more Sam Silver books to come. Indeed the third one, Kidnapped, has already been published.  If these two are anything to go by, then there will be more fun, nonsense, action and suspense to enjoy. And all of that laced with delightful little black and white illustrations by Leo Hartas too (my personal favourite is the weeping pirate in The Ghost Ship).

So, a joyous lot of nonsense, here. No messages, no preaching, just good clean fun. Perfect for little boys and maybe even some tomboy girls. And nice and short and easy to read. How refreshing is that in the run up to Christmas?

 The lovely folks at Orion Books provided these review copies. If you want one for yourself, then please click through from here and Amazon will make a small contribution to the maintenance of this blog.

  

The Gathering Dark by Leigh Bardugo

I vowed to myself a while back that I wouldn't read any more books featuring a teenage girl with an unhealthy fixation for a vampire, were-wolf, demon, fallen angel or any other mythical beast or humanoid. I'd read enough, had enough, and could rehearse the hackneyed plot lines in my sleep.

And I held true to that vow until I was sent The Gathering Dark.

Now to be fair The Gathering Dark doesn't quite fall into the 'paranormal romance' category. For starters, it's set in another world where there are humans and Grisha - semi-magical humans with individual special powers - and our heroine, Alina,turns out to be one of these magical creatures herself. In fact, to start with, I was more struck by similarities with another recent huge hit, The Hunger Games. You have the same peasant girl who gets dragged from her poor surroundings and plunged into a fantastically rich and priveleged environment, only to have to fight for her very survival shortly thereafter. You have the same fascination with food, clothing, hair and make-up. (Seriously, are teenage girls that shallow?) And you have the same ordinary guy love interest that gets left behind.


And there we were until about half way along. And then it all sort of changed. First there was a brief flirtation with Twilight territory as Alina struggled to decide between good old Mal, or the dangerously sexy Darkling. But then she starts to see the truth, the excitement levels increase and the book becomes the page turner that you had hoped it would be before the clothing, hair and make-up got in the way. From about page 200 on it's difficult to put the book down. There's violent action, then moments of true tenderness, and all set against a richly depicted imaginary world.

There's no doubt that Leigh Bardugo has created a fascinating world here and it defines the book's uniqueness. Maybe the similarities with other books are unavoidable in the current economic climate. I can see that something that could be described as The Hunger Games meets Twilight might have the dollar signs rolling in the publiher's eyes. But Bardugo does, somehow, rise above this and I'm intrigued to see what happens in the next book in the trilogy.

 The lovely people at Orion Books provided this review copy. If you would like to get your own please click below and Amazon will kindly send a small contribution towards maintaining this blog.