Bloody Jack by L A Meyer

[Janet]

 

Bloody Jack by L A Meyer

 

The ‘blurb’

Life as a ship’s boy aboard HMS Dolphin is a dream come true for Jacky Faber. Gone are the days of scavenging for food and fighting for survival on the streets of eighteenth-century London. Instead, Jacky is becoming a skilled and daring sailor as the crew hunts murderous pirates on the high seas.

 

There’s just one problem: Jacky is a girl…

 

Meyer is the favourite author of my American pen pal so I decided to try one of his books for myself. He wrote this, his first young adult novel and part of a series about Jacky “Bloody Jack” Faber, at the age of 60.

 

In 1797, when Mary is about eight years old, her family are wiped out by plague and she finds refuge on the streets with a gang who survive by stealing food and sleeping huddled together for warmth in their ‘kip’ under a bridge.

 

Some four years later, one of her gang is killed and Mary takes his clothes and disguises herself as a boy. She leaves the gang and heads for the Thames where she is recruited as a “ship’s boy” and is assigned to the schoolteacher onboard the Dolphin because of her ability to read.

 

Life on the ship is sometimes hard, but Mary, now known as Jacky, enjoys the work and the company of the other ship’s boys. However, she is growing up and it can only be a matter of time before her secret is discovered.

 

It’s an easy read and Meyer’s portrayal of a young girl pretending to be a boy onboard a ship, who has to live, and at times fight, as a boy is convincing. It’s what I would call a good yarn and I hugely enjoyed it. I will definitely look out for book two, although I don’t normally ‘do’ series.

 

One thing - I guess it’s because these books were written by an American author for the American market, but there is no way a British ship in the early nineteenth century would be called Endeavor without the missing ‘u’!