Mystery at Blackbeard's Cove

Mystery at Blackbeard's Cove by Audrey Penn
Artwork by Joanna Miller
2.5/5 stars
Tanglewood, 2007
343 pages
Middle-Grade

Source: Received an e-copy via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

This was an older book I found while poking around on Netgalley and with my deep love for the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, I decided to request it. The beginning was promising with a pirate raid occurring.

However we then shift to the present and I felt the story slooooow down. There is set up around the widow Mrs. McNemmish who wants to be buried at sea. A group of four children are enlisted to ensure that this last wish is carried out: Billy, Daniel, Mark, and Stefanie.

Now I know I usually love books with my name but a. it's spelled wrong and b. Stefanie was annoying. She whined a lot and never seemed committed to the spirit of adventure like the boys were. Mark didn't speak although he could communicate a lot through facial expressions and gestures and I found the other two boys indistinguishable. So it's safe to say that I didn't click with the characters.

But what about the plot? Although quite a few events are detailed, I felt like this book dragged. It took me ages to read it and I ended up stopping and reading something else more than a few times before buckling down to finish. Why didn't I DNF? Well, I try to give any book I receive for a review a strong chance. By the time, I was considering stopping, I was already pretty far in and I wanted to know what happened, just for curiosity's sake. I will say that I thought the book improved with more excitement near the end. But there was so much that bored me in the beginning that I almost didn't stay for that good stuff.

Overall: I could not connect with the characters and felt the plot dragged for about the first half. While it did pick up, I was never fully immersed in the story.

Cover: I do like the skull-very piratey even though I feel like that aspect wasn't strongly emphasized in this book.

Two Moon Princess

Two Moon Princess by Carmen Ferreiro-Esteban
Tanglewood Press, 2007
319 pages
YA; Fantasy
3/5 stars

Source: Received an e-copy via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Based on the cover and title, I thought this was going to be a fantasy along the lines of maybe a Tamora Pierce story. I should have examined the cover more closely to notice the girl's contemporary wardrobe, foreshadowing how main character Princess Andrea travels between her world of historical fantasy and our world of the 2000s. While this is an interesting concept, it wasn't what I expected and that contributed to my disappointment.

The other disappointment was the characters, especially Andrea who is 14 in her world, which translates to 17 in ours due to different measurements of time and who seemed to waffle between those ages, making many incomprehensible decisions. She didn't seem like a coherent character. First she wants to be a squire, then she is adjusting to California life, then she's back in her world, trying to avert war. I can connect her actions in my mind but the dialogue and description painted her in vastly different ways over the course of the novel. And not because she was growing but because of author convenience, it seemed.

The other characters were also a tangle of personalities, with either abrupt personality changes or not enough background.  For example, Andrea has three sisters, all of whom could have been potentially interesting but who were really sidelined. The sisters do have an impact on the plot but at the expense of their character development, at least in the eyes of this reader. Andrea's mother was also a confusing figure; she was actually from our world but she gave that up for love with a man who seemed more cruel and unworthy of her love, at least in his behavior to their daughters.

There were some nice points against war and about male pride, that I tend to agree with. And the story itself had some cool threads. Two worlds colliding and a girl struggling to find her place could be a great story. But because of the characters, this one just didn't hang together and left me frustrated with them.

Overall: Interesting story but weak characters.