Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #358318 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-03
• Released on: 2005-08-11
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781582346656
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Nancy Kington, a wealthy merchant’s daughter living in Bristol, England in the early 1700’s, is sometimes lonely but enjoys the privileges her father’s business brings. Minerva Sharpe is a penniless slave’s daughter living and working on the Kington’s Jamaican plantation. These two young women, united through a set of extraordinary circumstances including a brutal murder, an arranged marriage, and set of ruby earrings, find themselves sailing the high seas in search of love, adventure and freedom—as pirates!

Celebrated British author Celia Rees (Witch Child, Sorceress) has penned a treasure chest of a tale that will keep teens glued to the pages until the last villain sinks to a deserved watery grave and the last beautiful heroine is reunited with her lost love. Frustrated land-lubbers will want to follow up this four-star read with L.A. Meyer’s Bloody Jack: Being an Account of the Curious Adventures of Mary "Jacky" Faber, Ship’s Boy or Sara Lorimer‘s Booty, a collection of all-true tales of swashbuckling women.--Jennifer Hubert

From School Library Journal
Grade 7 Up–Listeners will find oceans of adventure with a feminine twist in Celia Rees's Pirates! (Bloomsbury, 2003). This vividly-recounted, first person tale is told by Nancy Kington, an English heiress who flees to the high seas to avoid a cruel, arranged marriage. She's accompanied by Minerva Sharpe, her mulatto maid turned confidante, and both young women dress and work as men on a pirate ship that is plundering the West Indies in the early 18th century. Encounters with other pirates, British authorities, slave dealers, and mutinous crew members provide plenty of action, and although these women are strong and capable, they don't lose their softer side. They have many loyal shipmates, but Kington continues to seek her lost love and Sharpe finds a new one. Treasures are won and lost, and a set of ruby jewels almost proves their undoing, but in the end each young woman returns to safer shores. When their paths must diverge, they are sustained by powerful bonds of friendship and family. Jennifer Wiltsie narrates with a light British accent that turns from flint to velvet as the story demands. The sturdy case has an intriguing cover, and both case and cassettes are well marked. Sound quality is good with appropriate music opening and closing the book's narration. Listeners who grew up with Avi's The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (HarperCollins, 1992) will find this occasionally violent story equally riveting. It is an exciting recording that will attract adventure-loving audiences in middle, high school, and public libraries.–Barbara Wysocki, Cora J. Belden Library, Rocky Hill, CT
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Gr. 7-10. In eighteenth-century England, teenage Nancy, whose mother died in childbirth, has been groomed for an arranged marriage that will secure her family's fortune, which is in ruins following the death of her father, a sugar merchant and slave trader. When Nancy's brothers secretly broker her marriage to a ruthless Caribbean plantation owner, Nancy travels to her family's estate in Jamaica. As she bonds tightly to two slaves, Phillis and her daughter, Minerva, she confronts the source of her family's wealth for the first time and realizes what slavery really means. Fleeing her would-be husband and the unspeakable inhumanity on the plantation, Nancy escapes the island with Minerva, and together they join the crew of a pirate ship, traveling the seas and sword slinging with the men. Rees ties her sprawling, swashbuckling story together with numerous contrivances, and descriptions of violence on the plantation and on the ship veer into territory that may be too mature for some middle-schoolers. But as in Witch Child (2001), Rees evokes the times with stunning precision, and in Nancy's fierce, period-appropriate voice, she tells a riveting, full-speed adventure filled with girl-powered action, magic, and love, even as it explores the brutality and horror of dark historical times. Gillian Engberg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

Richie's Picks: PIRATES!
"I was of a roving frame of mind, even as a child, and for years my fancy had been to set sail on one of my father's ships. One grey summer morning, in 1722, my wish was granted, but not quite in the way that I would have wanted."

Celia Rees's PIRATES! is a spicy blend of adventure, history, greed, loyalty, danger, sisterhood, (and pants), involving two young women--one who has been born into wealth in Britain, the other into slavery in Jamaica--in the early 1700s.

Nancy Kington, the wealthy merchant's daughter whose mother died giving birth to her, narrates the story. It begins with the sordid events through which her brother's gambling costs the family its fortune and how, shortly thereafter on his death bed, Nancy's father schemes with her brothers to restore their wealth. Unbeknownst to her at the time, Nancy is made the bartering chip for consummating that deal.

"My father was a sugar merchant and a trader in slaves. He owned plantations in Jamaica, and that's where I was bound, but I had not been told the why or wherefore of it. My father's dying wish, that was all my brothers would say. I was not yet sixteen years old, and a girl, so I was neither asked, nor consulted. They assumed I was stupid. But I am far from that. I knew enough not to trust either of them and time was to prove me right. They had sold me as surely as any African they trafficked from the coast of Guinea."

Nancy is a teenager you've gotta love. In contrast to the typical upbringing of British females of the time, she's been taught to read by Robert, the slave her father has brought back from his Jamaican holdings to maintain the household. ("My father saw no reason to pay a houseful of women to sit about clacking and gossiping and eating his food, their backsides getting fatter by the day.") Nancy's taught herself to letter and number by repeatedly copying documents in her father's office. She's picked up fencing from her big brother. Thanks to her father's permissiveness, she's grown up strong and feisty, romping in the sunshine on the quayside of Bristol:

When she arrives at her family's Jamaican plantations, she learns the real human cost of that sugar and "spice" whose sale had provided her comfortable childhood. And then, along with the adolescent slave girl Minerva Sharpe, whose job it is to care for her, Nancy discovers the heavy personal price that has been struck on her shoulder in exchange for allowing her brothers to maintain their privileged economic position. Neither willing to accept the deal worked out without her consent, nor willing to allow the behavior of the plantation's white men toward Minerva--who has rapidly become like a sister to her--the two young women together embark upon a path that eventually leads to a career "on the account," a euphemism for piracy.

We follow Nancy and Minerva, both pursuing and being pursued, as they sail across the high seas, in and out of colonies and islands, storms, African settlements, and confederacies, accompanied by a spectacular collection of daring and dangerous characters.

" 'I put my faith in the stones,' he smiled at me across the table. 'They do not fade, they do not rot, and they do not lose their value. They are light to carry and easy to keep close.' He patted his pocket. 'They will never let you down.' "

Put your faith in Celia Rees's PIRATES! You'll love the rollicking adventures of these 18th century spice girls! (And for those of you who fancy setting sail for LA or Toronto in search of convention plunder, be sure to aim your sights on the Bloomsbury booth, for PIRATES! is a real jewel that will not let you down.)

Read up me hearties, yo ho!
Taking place in the 1700's, this is the story of Nancy Kington and Minierva Sharpe who are forced to run away from the Kington's Jamaican plantation, after killing a man in self defence. They first travel to a secret community hidden in rural Jamaica. The pirates arrive and Nancy and Minerva join them dressed as men. Amid mutinies, battles, and run-ins with the navy, a strange ship is chasing them! Who are they and what will they do when they catch the pirates?
I liked the never ending action and suspence in Pirates! . There was never a dull moment. I'd have to say that even though the language was sometimes hard to understand it fit the time and place of the story perfectly and helped to set the stage.If you enjoy english history, want to learn more about life at sea, or just plain old love pirate tales, then this is the book for you.

Great Story, Real Page-Turner
I LOVED Pirates! I took it out of the school library in hopes it would have relation to Pirates of the Caribbean with Johnny Depp, who's my understood IDOL. But, anyway, to the book.

You enter into the world of Nancy Kington, daughter of a very rich plantation owner. When her father dies, he leaves a plantation in Jamaica to her, and she befriends slaves. Then, when she is almost forced to marry, she runs away and eventually (very delayed... annoying that the book is called pirates, and they didn't get to the Pirates until about page 150!) joins a band of pirates. She makes startling discoveries, and her ex-suitor does find her.

I loved this book. It is actually 380 pages, and I read it in two days! I bought other books by Celia Rees, I now am a big fan of hers. Buy this book TODAY or else you'll be cursed by pirates!

---rAchEl....
celia rees fan