Jacky Goes Down Under

[bloodygranuaile]

I skipped a book. I read The Wake of the Lorelei Lee: Being an Account of the Further Adventures of Jacky Faber, On Her Way to Botany Bay without reading Rapture of the Deep. This is very unlike me and I do not know how I feel about it. *has identity crisis*

Anyway, The Wake  of the Lorelei Lee was extremely entertaining and irritated me a lot less than My Bonny Light Horseman, as I feel it had less suspension-of-disbelief-shatteringly pointless fanservice. Also, Jaimy Fletcher is actually badass now, so this is the first book where I actually wanted them to stay together.

I this book, Jacky is sentenced to transportation for life in the penal colony at New South Wales, Australia. Her ship, the Lorelei Lee, is confiscated and given to the East India Company, which... uses it as a transportation ship to bring a boatload of female convicts to Australia! Jacky is not happy about being reduced to a lowly passenger on her own ship, and immediately begins social climbing as well as she can. This is aided by the fact that she has a completely ridiculous set of assets at her disposal--in addition to already knowing the ship inside and out, her manservant Higgins has been employed as Assistant Purser, there are at least three guys on the ship's crew she already knows, Mairead McConnaughty is also a convict on board, and Higgins has secured her seabag (which is either enormous or a Magic Bag of Holding, considering the amount of shit she keeps in it at this point in the series) and all of her musical instruments, and this and that and the other thing...

Actually, the main theme of this entire book is Let's Recap Everyone Jacky Has Ever Met On Her Adventures Thus Far. I think the Chinese pirates Jacky gets captured by near the end might actually be the only entirely new group of characters. I realize the world's population was a lot smaller then, and that Jacky has met a lot of people in her adventures, but damn. It's getting soap-opera-y. However, the whole series is so goofy that I am not sure this is a bad thing; the only times it ever annoyed me was when I couldn't remember who someone was because it had been so long since I'd read their book.

I was worried that this book might end up being a little too much like a rewarmed version of In the Belly of the Bloodhound, what with the whole "big ship full of captured young ladies" plot, but it really wasn't. Jaimy's bits of the story were actually a lot more like Bloodhound than any of Jacky's, which was actually pretty cool, because orchestrating mutinies is never not exciting. I was also somewhat amused at the bit in Jaimy's chapters when he was talking about some of the guards threatening the comely young Daniel Connolly in a rapey sort of manner, and was all like "I AM SURE THIS SEXUAL DEVIANCE MUST SHOCK EVEN YOU", and then we cut to Jacky's chapters where she is essentially being held as a lesbian pirate's bedslave and is all "THIS IS THE BEST CAPTIVITY EVER".

Shortly after I finished this book I discovered the hilarious yet depressing notracistbut.com, and found that Australia is nearly as well-represented there as the US in terms of posts of cranky white people being Not Racist But worrying about "those people" taking over their culture and speaking different languages, and was all like "Ah, yes, THOSE PEOPLE, they are not descended from GOOD BRITISH CONVICTS like us!" But I shouldn't make fun of Australia, because said descendants of convicts appear to have built a much nicer and more functional democracy than ours, or at least if their Congress or Parliament or whatever they have almost imploded the world economy last week from sheer deliberate fuckery then nobody has seen fit to tell me about it. Also, the American colonies were also used as a transportation destination for quite a long time, only nobody likes to talk about it; we seem to think the Pilgrim Fathers came over on the Mayflower in 1620 and then the entire country was populated by nothing but their offspring until the mid-nineteenth-century immigration waves. Our history, we totally knows it.

I sadly do not have many intelligent thoughts on this book, as I ripped through it rather quickly, but overall I liked it, and I found it somewhat less problematic than usual on the things I usually think are problematic about the Jacky books, so that is a good trend and I hope it continues.

Also, I think they should make Bloody Jack movies and cast Ellen Page as Jacky; she is small and cute and apparently pretty badass, and also I just watched Whip It this evening so she is right at the forefront of my brain.

Comments

[skygiants]

I loved the lesbian pirate stuff (and the fact that after the lesbian pirate captivity Jacky is like 'lol I'm not even gonna try and claim to be a virgin for Jaimy anymore, sorry') and the "let's get fake married to my gay bff!" stuff, and that Jaimy had an interesting storyline. I actually found it more problematic than many of the other books, though - there was all the terrible terrible India stuff. >.<

There should totally be Bloody Jack movies, though.

[bloodygranuaile.livejournal.com]

The India stuff was definitely pretty cringeworthy, particularly when Jacky adopts Ravi and somehow all her "hey look a street urchin just like me" empathy goes out the window the second he actually gets on the ship and suddenly it's all "I found a small Indian; I am going to keep it as a pet and dress it up in clothes I think are funny, like a doll" and uhhh. >.> But I kind of went into the book being predominantly like "I need to watch out for the pervy old man factor, that is the thing to watch out for in this series" and so when that turned out to be less egregious than in Horseman I was very relieved, because I felt like the trend thus far had been that that had been getting steadily worse with each volume.