In which there are badass lady pirates
May. 20th, 2011 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileOne of them is named Boudicca.
Totally not in honor of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie at all, because I totally forgot about it, I finally got around to reading what was once and Advance Reading Copy of Adrienne Kress' Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. I don't know what you would call it now, as it is no longer in advance of the release of the book, which happened in 2007. If I ever am blessed with advance reading copies of anything else, I will try to read them in a timely enough fashion that the review will be all hip and useful to people and stuff.
Anyway, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman was something halfway between the sort of thing I really like to read and the sort of thing I could see myself writing on a day when I was feeling inordinately clever and pleased with myself, in that it is a fun swashbuckling adventure involving kidnapping and pirates and conspiracies and lost treasure and a spontaneous musical number, but it is also distinctly aimed at nerdy ten-year-olds who consider themselves immensely superior to their peers, and not twenty-something-year-old overeducated former nerdy-ten-year-olds-who-considered-themselves-immensely-superior-to-their-peers. So some of the tropes struck me as a little tropey and some of the jokes struck me as a little twee, but this is hardly surprising, since I basically picked it up off the shelf at random because I was annoyed that I did not have my copies of A Song of Ice and Fire on hand for rereading. (Waaay different kind of story.) It makes ample use of Authorial Voice in the tradition of Victorian children's stories, and it still contains pirates, and it never quite tells you when or where the story is supposed to take place, which sort of leaves the reader (if the reader is me, anyway) sort of assuming it takes place in late nineteenth-century England from the diction, and then getting very jarred when things like laptops and plastic gloves and sophisticatedly computerized refrigerators show up.
Our Heroine is ten-year-old Alexandra Morningside, a nerdy ten-year-old who is immensely superior to her peers. She goes to the very prestigious Wigpowder-Steele Academy, and becomes very good friend with her sixth grade teacher, Mr. Underwood, who is a pretty cool dude and teaches her fencing and things (she is, of course, quite good at fencing, because no matter how nerdy your Adventure Protagonist For Nerdy Children is, they are always good at martial athletics. This is why I could never be a nerdy children's book Adventure Protagonist). Alex learns of an ancient feud between the families of Wigpowder and Steele, where Wigpowder was an infamous pirate and Steele was the philanthropist that made sure half of his fortune got turned into a prestigious academy after his death. The feud concerns the other half of the treasure, which has, of course, been buried. Several generations later, Steele's last descendant has become an infamous pirate, and Wigpowder's last descendant is Mr. Underwood. Mr. Underwood gets kidnapped by pirates who think he knows where the treasure is, which he doesn't. Alex finds out, but does not get kidnapped by the pirates because she gets temporarily kidnapped by hilariously evil and gross old ladies instead, and so when she escapes she goes on a grand quest to rescue her teacher and help him find the buried pirate treasure that is his birthright. Alex' adventures on her way to kidnap her teacher are ridiculously funny and just to the side of the sort of thing you'd expect them to be. In addition to more run-ins with the hilariously evil old ladies, Alex meets a drunken magician, a super-fancy hotelier who is attempting (rather disastrously) to run his hotel via mind-reading, a kindly Navy captain, a movie crew attempting to film a movie with a (or rather, the) Extremely Ginormous Octopus, and a train full of rather twenties-style partiers where time doesn't move right. And this doesn't even get us to the pirates, who are quite an entertaining crew indeed.
I quite enjoyed this book but I must admit that at the end I found myself less wanting to read Kress' second book than I did just wanting to hang out with Adrienne Kress, because I think that we seem to both have similar interests, such as pseudo-Victorian children's stories, badass lady pirates, and making personal asides to the Reader while ostensibly talking about someone else's story in order to show off how witty we are.
Totally not in honor of the fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie at all, because I totally forgot about it, I finally got around to reading what was once and Advance Reading Copy of Adrienne Kress' Alex and the Ironic Gentleman. I don't know what you would call it now, as it is no longer in advance of the release of the book, which happened in 2007. If I ever am blessed with advance reading copies of anything else, I will try to read them in a timely enough fashion that the review will be all hip and useful to people and stuff.
Anyway, Alex and the Ironic Gentleman was something halfway between the sort of thing I really like to read and the sort of thing I could see myself writing on a day when I was feeling inordinately clever and pleased with myself, in that it is a fun swashbuckling adventure involving kidnapping and pirates and conspiracies and lost treasure and a spontaneous musical number, but it is also distinctly aimed at nerdy ten-year-olds who consider themselves immensely superior to their peers, and not twenty-something-year-old overeducated former nerdy-ten-year-olds-who-considered-themselves-immensely-superior-to-their-peers. So some of the tropes struck me as a little tropey and some of the jokes struck me as a little twee, but this is hardly surprising, since I basically picked it up off the shelf at random because I was annoyed that I did not have my copies of A Song of Ice and Fire on hand for rereading. (Waaay different kind of story.) It makes ample use of Authorial Voice in the tradition of Victorian children's stories, and it still contains pirates, and it never quite tells you when or where the story is supposed to take place, which sort of leaves the reader (if the reader is me, anyway) sort of assuming it takes place in late nineteenth-century England from the diction, and then getting very jarred when things like laptops and plastic gloves and sophisticatedly computerized refrigerators show up.
Our Heroine is ten-year-old Alexandra Morningside, a nerdy ten-year-old who is immensely superior to her peers. She goes to the very prestigious Wigpowder-Steele Academy, and becomes very good friend with her sixth grade teacher, Mr. Underwood, who is a pretty cool dude and teaches her fencing and things (she is, of course, quite good at fencing, because no matter how nerdy your Adventure Protagonist For Nerdy Children is, they are always good at martial athletics. This is why I could never be a nerdy children's book Adventure Protagonist). Alex learns of an ancient feud between the families of Wigpowder and Steele, where Wigpowder was an infamous pirate and Steele was the philanthropist that made sure half of his fortune got turned into a prestigious academy after his death. The feud concerns the other half of the treasure, which has, of course, been buried. Several generations later, Steele's last descendant has become an infamous pirate, and Wigpowder's last descendant is Mr. Underwood. Mr. Underwood gets kidnapped by pirates who think he knows where the treasure is, which he doesn't. Alex finds out, but does not get kidnapped by the pirates because she gets temporarily kidnapped by hilariously evil and gross old ladies instead, and so when she escapes she goes on a grand quest to rescue her teacher and help him find the buried pirate treasure that is his birthright. Alex' adventures on her way to kidnap her teacher are ridiculously funny and just to the side of the sort of thing you'd expect them to be. In addition to more run-ins with the hilariously evil old ladies, Alex meets a drunken magician, a super-fancy hotelier who is attempting (rather disastrously) to run his hotel via mind-reading, a kindly Navy captain, a movie crew attempting to film a movie with a (or rather, the) Extremely Ginormous Octopus, and a train full of rather twenties-style partiers where time doesn't move right. And this doesn't even get us to the pirates, who are quite an entertaining crew indeed.
I quite enjoyed this book but I must admit that at the end I found myself less wanting to read Kress' second book than I did just wanting to hang out with Adrienne Kress, because I think that we seem to both have similar interests, such as pseudo-Victorian children's stories, badass lady pirates, and making personal asides to the Reader while ostensibly talking about someone else's story in order to show off how witty we are.
I may read the second book anyway, once I am off my books-buying abstinent stint.
