Directors' Choice Award Winner Finalist
If you were forced to sail with pirates . . . captured and tried for piracy . . . and sentenced to swing . . . Would you trade your soul to the crew of the Flying Dutchman to save the girl you love?
Ricky did. And honestly, in hindsight, he's not sure that was his best decision.
Last winter, Ricky Bradshaw was just another gangly freshman trying to fit in — or at least not get picked on — and maybe catch the attention of Becky Nance, a girl in his biology class. A perfectly reasonable set of goals. Tragically, Ricky also has absence seizures, which cause him to zone out at unpredictable moments.
And so it was during a seizure episode, his spirit, soul, body — or maybe it's all in his head — traveled back in time to pirate land. Becky Nance has no comment. His parents have several.
When Dead Calm, Bone Dry opens, Ricky is shackled in a ship's brig, on his way to trial for piracy. This is, objectively, a significant step down from not being popular in high school. His fellow inmate turns out to be surprisingly well-spoken for a prisoner — a playwright of some renown, the kind whose work is still assigned in high school English class — and offers what sounds like genuinely good advice. Which, in pirate land, is its own kind of warning sign.
Things go predictably sideways from there. Ricky narrowly escapes the hangman's noose via cliff diving — a sentence that should give you some idea of how his day is going — only to wake up in a hut on a beach with cannibals sharpening their knives. So, not a spa day.
Real? A dream? That remains unclear, though Ricky can attest that what follows is eerily similar to an outlandishly out-of-body nightmare — which, for a kid who just escaped a hangman's noose via cliff diving, is what doctors call "The tunnel of bright light you'll definitely want to run from," and what Ricky calls Pop Quiz Day.
Still, Ricky being Ricky, he refuses to quit. He's got orphaned children to rescue, a girl's heart to win, and somewhere out there, a father to find — all while navigating mayhem, betrayal, and what can only be described as a living, breathing, thoroughly inconvenient date with his destiny.
Only if his trip to the past is an indicator of his future, he will not need shades.
Some dead men do tell tales. And some of them have very strong opinions about what they will do to Ricky if they ever get their hands on him.
And don’t worry, parents — the Caribbean Chronicles Series remains a vessel of wholesome — as in, “some holes in the hull” — entertainment. There is zero sexual content, some violence that is, admittedly, slightly more dramatic than a church bake sale but considerably less alarming than your child’s search history, and relatively clean language considering the hygiene of the pirates cast for this story.
We hope you enjoy these pirate books for young adults, teens, and older kids — and we accept no responsibility for any sudden, inexplicable interest in nautical maps, buried treasure, or cliff diving.
