Daughter of the Pirate King is the first novel in new series and is also the first book written by Tricia Levenseller. The second book Daughter of the Siren Queen is due to come out in February 2018.

Please note that this review contains spoilers. 

This book is about Alosa, the only child Pirate King has ever admitted being his. Even more – he trained and raised his daughter himself, paying careful attention to all the skills necessary to lead a pirate life and at some point become the Pirate Queen.

In this book, we follow Alosa on a very special mission her father has given her and the girl is not planning to disappoint him.

This book is a quick read, it is more suitable for middle-grade reading, I think. It does not delve into detail, which annoyed me a great deal. I am usually up for short descriptions because the longer those are, the more boring it becomes… usually. However, this time it annoyed me. The reason being that when Alosa was doing something incredibly stupid (like searching lower rate pirates instead of the first mate), I was annoyed, because obviously, if her pattern or thought was to search from top to bottom, why do lower rate before the first mate?

Well, that would be fine (read: I could accept that she’s not as smart as she thinks she is) if it wouldn’t be that 20 pages later we are told that actually before Alosa did that stupid thing, she already considered and tried to get into first mate’s quarters and it didn’t work out. It felt like such an unprofessional writing – not telling the reader important bits of the story and then mentioning them later. Really? This pattern occurred a couple of times, not just once.

Moving on to the characters, Alosa was incredibly full of herself. I understand that she has gone through an extensive training programme and has suffered a lot to have the skills and confidence she has, but it was too much. She was a brat. What happened when suddenly she was in a situation she hadn’t planned? She sort of didn’t do anything at all, except being sad and angry and throwing threats around. All that bravado was for nothing.

The story at some points seemed like a rip off from Pirates of Carribean. I have never considered how many different storylines you can actually have with pirates, but the elements that kept popping up reminded me a lot of the popular franchise, which I wouldn’t mind if this book would be awesome. For example, some of the elements: sirens, secret map, something divided between the coolest pirates, an island full of treasures (possibly cursed), magic, two cool “enemy” pirates (I’m talking about those two funny guards of course) etc. I think that there is more to the pirate theme than this.

Nevertheless, I hope that the author is going to improve, after all, this was only the first book and there’s plenty of space to grow and develop her writing so I will keep up with the series.

This book received two stars from me on my Goodreads page and I think it is a pretty good read for children. There is some romance so I would say – 12-14-year-olds could enjoy it. And in general who doesn’t love pirates?

Have you read the book? Any thoughts? Do you have pirate book recommendations for me? Spill them all, I love a good pirate story and haven’t read much of them! Cheerio!

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