The Unbinding of Mary Reade by Miriam McNamara

A lot of pirate life probably was waiting around for opportunities to arise, as the characters do in this book, but that’s not as fun to read about.Īlso I wasn’t a fan of the book’s structure. I wanted a queer pirate treasure island, I guess – whether or not that’s historically accurate is another matter (it probably wasn’t) but you come to expect some of those trappings from pirate stories. No buried treasure? Maps? Sword fighting? None of that? These are things we expect from the genre. My main issue is that there wasn’t a lot of pirate stuff in it.

Unfortunately though, the cons outweighed the pros for me with this book. As a poor woman in the 18th century, the odds were not in her favor and she has learned to manipulate the men around her and play the system, using her sexuality to gain safety and favors, but we see her coming up against the pervasive lack of fairness and unequal treatment of women at that time, which all works great. Anne was an excellent combination of manipulative and vulnerable, capable and helpless, totally over-confident at times and totally self-pitying the next. I also liked the character of Anne Bonny, the female pirate who our protagonist Mary becomes enamored with. In general, the setting was well described – colorful parrots fly overhead, the sea is shining under the hot sun etc. Bodies melt into each other like ‘candle wax’ and the characters are always covered in gritty sand (okay, so maybe that’s not sensual, but it is specific and probably realistic).

And some of the sensual scenes are really well written without being explicit – it’s a Young Adult book, so it’s still appropriate for that audience. At its core this book is really a romance, between Mary Reade and another female pirate called Anne Bonny (also a real person). I’ll start with some of what works about the book.

The Unbinding of Mary Reade by Miriam McNamara