Customer Reviews

The Pirate's Daughter

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The twists in the plot are so important that you should not read detailed reviews (like the Kirkus one on this web page)before reading The Pirate's Daughter. This book is full of surprising twists and turns. Very unpredictable. Unconventional. An incredibly creative work. I can't think of another book like it. Full of adventure, adventure moreover that puts you in moral dilemmas--very provoking and definitely not "escapism" or mere entertainment. It is seemingly an improbable tale--who believes in pirates these days?--but I actually recall news reports of piracy in the south seas even today. This may be a "guy" book--a male's fantasy of being conned/abducted by an irresistably sensual woman into a world-class adventure. On the other hand, maybe this could be a female fantasy too? I like the way characters in an episode in the beginning, in New York, tie in with events in Afria in the end of the book. Nothing is disconnected. The book is tight. The only thing about the book that made me uneasy was its characterization of West Africa which, having travelled there myself, seemed stereotypically negative and uninformed. There are many Africas, and this is definitely one of them (the civil wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone come to mind), but it's not the one I like to think about.

Don't listen to the bad reviews about this book ( good grief folks..it's just a story!!). The bad reviewers here don't give the writer enough credit..This book will hold you captive from the first page! Who cares if all the info. isn't correct (again..it's just a story folks!!) If you want a book that has adventure, mystery, romance and suspense you will like it..It was a violent in some places but I held out just because I had to find out what happened next! I gave it 4 stars because of the violence but it's worth checking out!!

Maybe due to simple youth and inexperience, this book made me horribly sad. I cried for about an hour at the end. I felt especially bad for Cricket. She was a bad person, but it was the only life she had ever known, and she wanted to escape from it, but needed to wait so she could escape without looking back. I felt sad for Wilson too. I mean, he was the good guy and he did what he thought was right and it was right, obviously, but to just forget? It seems so sad.
Anyway, the writing style was pretty good, easy to follow, unlike some older classics that can't say anything straight out, and with a really clever blend of reality and fiction. The characters were believable, and though it was a really sad, brutal story, I got snapped at three times in one class today for surreptitiously picking up this book to read.

Fantastic! I've had this sitting on my shelf to read for a few years now and finally got around to it. And I'm so glad that I did. Girardi spins a tale worthy of a sailor. Its got mystery, suspense, love, lust, greed, action, adventure - what more could you possibly want? From the first page, I was hooked and had a hard time slowing down to absorb all the details. I truly didn't want this novel to end. Grab a copy and enjoy.

When I first started reading this book, I thought that it was written more like a short story. The succint sentences and short chapters led me to think that the book was about to end. But as I got to the Second part of the novella, I was engrossed in the lust, mystery and passion between the two lovers. By the time they reached Quatre sables I could not put the book down! This book, recommended by a friend will be recommended to others because it instils in you the sense that the human spirit is not at all easily quashed.

I've never heard about pirates with a notebook connected by wire to databases around the world when they are about to make their victims "jump the plank" the old fashioned way! But, .... I can imagine it after reading this book! The author manage to mix the modern-day life and technology together with the feeling of the old era centuries ago when the black-eyed pirates sailed the seven seas! I'm already looking for Mr. Girardis next book. With this kind of writing it has to be great!!!!

I picked this up a year ago while browsing, intrigued by the cover and the title. It looked interesting, but I was reminded of my towering shelf of books to be read and so did not buy it then. The professor for my creative writing workshop class was going to be out of town for a class period, and announced that he was having a guest instructor for that class, who turned out to be Robert Girardi. The to-be-read shelf be damned, I like to know whose instructing I'm getting, so I went out and found this and his first novel, Madeleine's Ghost.

The story here is fairly straight-forward: Wilson Lander is a young man with a sense of dread, unable to complete his doctorate in archaelogy, and is working in the big city as a clerk to his girlfriend. He stumbles upon Cricket Page, who leads him into an exotic adventure as a galley cook on a tychoon's yacht called the Compound Interest. But Cricket is more than she seems (the title gives it away), and Wilson promises to be more than the nebbish than he initially seems.

I'm a pirate fan. There's something about the outlaw on the sea that intrigues me more than an outlaw on the land. Two of my favorites in this area are Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides and A.A. Attanasio's Wyvern. Long-time readers will remember a fairly lengthy discussion in 1992 or 1993 about Michael Scott Rohan's pirate book, Chase the Morning. So I was predisposed to liking this book, even though this describes a modern day piracy.

And I did like this book a lot--up until a certain point, the break between sections five and six, where Girardi lost my sense of disbelief in what the characters actually do. The motivations of the characters in other sections are a little hard to believe, but from a steady diet of a slightly more fantastical nature leads me to extend a bit more leeway to an author. The manner in which the story is told is very movie-like, and it was no surprise to me to discover that Girardi is also a screenwriter.

After our class meeting, I talked with Girardi about his book. During class he had made a disparaging comment regarding "genre," which seemed to me out of place, considering the fact that this book is basically an adventure story set in the modern era and his first novel is a ghost tale. His definition of genre (learned from his time at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, I think) was books that are essentially adventure and nothing more. Of course, as a "fan" of science fiction, I have always used genre as the word to describe the marketing labels placed on the various "types" of fiction: mainstream, SF, mystery. Later in the semester, I discovered that there is a third usage of genre: describing the "forms" of written communication, i.e., poetry, fiction, essay, biography, advertising, etc. From all this I have deduced that genre is a highly overused word and I have made myself a resolution to discontinue its use, in an attempt to promote more understanding between the three camps that have adopted it into their discourse.

What a great book! I read Madeline's Ghost a few months ago, and I thought it was quite a tale - but I enjoyed Pirate's Daughter much more. It is an adventure tale, but with love intrigues that make you squirm. I found myself "hoping" certain things would happen, but he kept surprising me. Please Mr. Girardi - keep on writing!

Positively mesmerizing if you want to escape for the day! Intrigue, suspense and action together with fascinating characters pull you into this novel and keep you there until the end. I highly recommend it.

Where to start? This book is crammed full of phony history, phony geography, phony science, phony anthropology, and (most unforgivable of all) phony philosophy -- none of which is either relevant to the plot or convincing. The plot lurches from one impossible coincidence to another. People act in reckless disregard of easily foreseeable consequences. Pirates spout history lessons for no reason (as if they'd care). Sailors allow 30-foot waves to "hit the side of their ship" with no apparent harm (um, you're supposed to sail into them). One snort of magic potion cures a longstanding mental problem. The tarot cards at the beginning are harped on ad nauseam and then forgotten for the rest of the book. The author is in serious need of a dictionary to learn the meanings of words like "translucent", "phosphorescent", and "founder" (he likes that one so much he misuses it at least three times). His imagery rivals that of William Peter Blatty at his purplest. It's upsetting to think that this man is actually teaching writing rather than trying to learn it -- though there is little evidence that he could. Skip this.