My Salty Mary

Gr 9 Up–The Little Mermaid ditches her prince and becomes a pirate under the alias Mary Read. She befriends—and friend-zones—the son of Blackbeard, then teams up with her pansexual half-merman cousin and his lover, Ann Bonny, in a competition to find Blackbeard’s treasure and win the title of Pirate King. Pirate-fiction fans, beware. The authors of this novel are honest. In the authors’ note, they establish that “in the interests of telling an enjoyable story,” they have “softened” the “actual murder and pillaging” and the historical Caribbean. The result is entertaining, for those who enjoy visiting places like Underwhere and Booty Island, or prefer books where ships are “parked” rather than docked; dynamite is used a century before its invention. While the reworking of the Little Mermaid story is fun as Mary contends with human culture, the fictional emancipation of Hans Christian Andersen’s heroine narrows the emotional scope of the novel to frothy silliness without delving into the sort of humor that comes with insight. By the end of the novel, a new Pirate Queen announces that “The Future of Piracy is us.” Must an “enjoyable” story be told at the expense of history?