Berls
Written on Dec 3, 2015
4.5 stars
So The Black Ship was exactly how I'd describe pretty much every Diana Pharaoh Francis book, Brutal and Fantastic! One of the things I always tell myself before going into her books is "remember Berls, she's going to torture her characters," and yet, somehow, I'm ALWAYS surprised and amazed by just how brutally she does just that. The thing is, it's not torturing them for torturing them's sake. It's to give her books - which are based in incredibly developed fantasy worlds - an undeniable believability. Let's face it, nothing ruins a book more than that eye roll that comes when your character is saved YET AGAIN in the most ridiculous way. Because they're the hero and good things happen to them in just the nick of time. Not in Diana's books. Nope. Her characters are real. They suffer. And if they get out of something, you don't roll your eyes. You breathe a breath of relief because they're FINALLY going to make it. It keeps you on the edge of your seat too, because you never quite know when THAT moment where you get to breathe the breath of relief will happen. So that's how The Black Ship unfolds in terms of what happens. I sat on the edge waiting for my character to actually not get tortured.
I do have to say, though, that it did take me a little bit to get into The Black Ship. The reason? It's book two in a series and I was really expecting to see some of the characters I'd already grown to love - Lucy and Martin. And they don't make much of an appearance in the book at all and when they do really show up the book is basically over. However, it is still most definitely connected to their story and you cannot read this out of order if you want to understand what's really happening. The Black Ship is a continuation of their story - it just took me a bit to realize how.
Once I embraced the new character though - wowza! I may have loved him more than Lucy and Martin. He was stubborn as all hell, which sometimes did lead to his torturing himself, but mostly it just showed what an incredibly good person he was - despite the odds. He's funny too, which is always a plus. And to top it off, he's a cat lover in a world that sees cats as bad luck. As in loves his cat so much he'd pretty much die for her. Yeah. Awesome guy (and I'm a dog person).
If details about sailing - albeit in a fantasy world where things are even more treacherous - bore you, the details in The Black Ship might bore you. I found them fascinating, since we're talking sailing in a world very much like Elizabethan or maybe Victorian England - as in dangerous - plus adding this incredible world of magical creatures to raise the stakes. It was exciting, mesmerizing, and yeah... Brutal and Fantastic. Thanks for picking it guys!