Saturday, July 01, 2017

Sixteen top pirate fantasy novels

At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Ceridwen Christensen tagged 16 essential pirate fantasy novels. One title on the list:
The Nature of a Pirate, by A.M. Dellamonica

This is a portal fantasy tailor-made for marine biology buffs—protagonist Sophie Hansa is a modern-day student of the science of aquatic life, as well as a burgeoning videographer, when she, camera in hand, inadvertently crosses over into a magical world while searching for her long-lost birth mother. With her incongruously modern technology, she becomes a sort of de facto chronicler of the world of Stormwrack, a watery world where much of the populace lives on the many ships that make up the Fleet of Nations. In the third, and most pirate-y, volume, Sophie becomes a key player in the effort to put down a roving band of marauders plundering the floating city-states. In rejigging the tropes of both portal fantasy and pirate stories, Dellamonica imagines a much more diverse and inclusive world, and gives her intelligent, headstrong lead a great deal of agency over her fate.
Read about two more entries on the list.

The Stormwrack series is among Martin Cahill's eight truly transporting portal fantasy novels.

The Page 69 Test: The Nature of a Pirate.

--Marshal Zeringue