The Pirate Queen

I remember really enjoying The Frozen River, so I was surprised by just how much I did not like The Pirate Queen. I had several issues with it, and by the end they had accumulated to the point that I was mostly just relieved to be finished. The alternating timelines felt like a poor structural choice, the story was repeatedly weakened by a forced twenty-first-century feminist lens, and the prose relied so heavily on cliché that it became painfully distracting.

I’ve complained before about the prevalence of alternating timelines in popular contemporary fiction, but this was an especially frustrating example because the structure seems to serve almost no purpose. There are plenty of downsides and very little upside. Unlike most alternating timelines, where the story moves back and forth between two distinct periods, this book alternates between three timelines that are all moving forward at the same time. If you put the chapters in chronological order, Grace’s life would unfold along a perfectly cohesive narrative line. Instead, we are constantly jumping decades forward and backward, interrupting whatever momentum each section has managed to build. It also means we repeatedly see the consequences of events before we see the events themselves, which weakens the sense of development in Grace’s character. Rather than building toward three distinct climaxes, we are actually left with no real climax at all.

The second thing that really bothered me is another issue I keep encountering in recent historical fiction, which is the tendency to essentially place a fully twenty-first-century woman into a historical setting and then surround her with contrived “woman versus the patriarchy” scenarios designed to produce a series of audience-pleasing victories. That is not to say that Grace was not an unusually strong, independent, and powerful woman. Her life makes it pretty clear that she was all of those things. The problem is that the novel doesn’t let her life just speak for itself. Again and again, Lawhon sets up men to underestimate or dismiss Grace because she is a woman, conveniently giving her another opportunity to prove them wrong. Grace O’Malley’s real life was extraordinary enough that I don’t think she needed to be constantly placed into these manufactured girlboss moments to make the point.

Nearly every page is riddled with the same tired somatic and emotional stock phrases.

Those two issues aside, it was the writing itself that finally wore me down completely. Nearly every page is so riddled with the same tired somatic and emotional stock phrases that I felt like I’d already read half the book in slightly different versions of the same sentences elsewhere. Breaths catch. Hearts hammer. Throats tighten. Mouths go dry. Lips curl. Jaws drop. Eyes flash. Bodies stiffen. Knuckles turn white. Gooseflesh rises. Shudders run up spines. Tears are blinked back. The world caves in. People feel “the shift” in the air or see “the shift” in someone’s eyes. None of these phrases would bother me much on their own, but the sheer density of them became almost comical. Once I started noticing it, I couldn’t stop.

There are also plenty of the kind of cringey, over-scripted lines I’d expect from a straight-to-VHS action movie. They seem intended as cinematic, mic-drop moments, but they almost always land as cheesy rather than powerful. Things like, “He’s only looking for a fight… we’ll give him one,” or, “Then how will they respect me?” “They won’t… not unless you make them.” Then there are lines like, “Grace does the one thing she has never done in her life… she surrenders,” and exchanges such as, “Tell me what exactly I’ve won in this encounter.” “Me.” The book keeps reaching for these dramatic little payoff lines, but they’re so familiar and so obviously engineered to land that they repeatedly pulled me out of the story.

There is a compelling story at the center of this book, and I wish I had enjoyed the telling of it more. I appreciated being introduced to a fascinating place and period in history, and the book left me wanting to learn more about Grace O’Malley and sixteenth-century Ireland. Grace herself was compelling enough to keep me reading, but unfortunately, almost everything about the way her story was presented made me want to stop.

Book author: Ariel Lawhon