REARS & VICES is E.M. CARO's involving, exciting Pirate Throuple luuuv tale

REARS & VICES
E.M. CARO
Tides & Troth Books LLC (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$17.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Black Sails and Hamilton meet in this queer, poly, spicy Historical Romance set during the 19th century Age of Revolution, when pirates briefly reclaimed the Gulf and Caribbean seas and provided crucial support toward anti-colonial nation-states. Perfect for fans of K.J. Charles, Cat Sebastian, and Courtney Milan!

HE THOUGHT HE’D BE A HERO BY NOW—AND THAT IT WOULD MEAN SOMETHING.

It’s 1816. The wars with France and America are over. Royal Navy career man Everard Anderson de Anglada sails the peacetime Great Lakes, demoted to captain of a tiny ten-gun schooner. When Preston D’Arcy, Everard’s former lieutenant and too-handsome ex-flame, forewarns him about a court-martial they must judge, Everard is begrudgingly grateful.

HE’S RADICAL, RESPECTED, UNFORGETTABLE—AND A PIRATE.

On the docket, however, is Vitaliy “Vitya” Gray, infamous pirate captain and anti-colonial weapons smuggler. Everard has crossed paths with him before—not strictly as enemies.

TOGETHER, THEY COULD BE LEGENDARY…

After a hasty jailbreak, philosophical debates, and proposals—pirate marriage, no strings—Everard finds himself, his heart, and even D’Arcy commandeered: to the Gulf of México. There, piracy is nothing like he imagined, and Vitya is everything Everard ever truly wished to be.

…SO LONG AS LEGEND DOESN’T GET IN THE WAY OF LOVE.

The Spanish crown looms. Dangerous secrets and betrayals come to light. Then Everard is offered a position with the revolutionary Galveston navy. Everard must decide: fulfill his desire for legacy… or stay beside the men with whom he’s fallen in love and make a legacy of their own.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Well-researched historical romance with twenty-first century guys parachuted in to do the romancin'. Consent would not remotely matter to guys born in the eighteenth century, nor would equality of the sexes be so unquestioned even among the pirates. Still, I'd prefer to have this quibble (and it's only a quibble) that to squeam out over dubcon or worse scenes, or grunt in disgust at period-appropriate sexism.

The essence of the story was the geopolitical complexity of the Napoleonic Wars, arguably the real Second World War after the Seven Years' War, which counts in my mind as the real First, acted out in the slowly decolonizing New World. There are many moving parts to the mens' relationship development. The idea of throuples is now public, and gaining acceptance under several nammes including polyamory. It's interesting to see it begin to root into historical fiction. It's exceedingly unlikely to be a modern invention but of course the evidence...written words, court documents, that kind of thing...is scant and mostly subject to interpretation.

Digression: this is how progress gets lost, y'all. The evil fucks who want to stop the massive numbers of people in the world from enjoying true liberty and happiness reset the social clock with destruction of records, of books, of art that depict the things they want to deny us. If histories vanish, History is what "They" say it is, and our actual lived lives, our hoped-for, dreamed-of, briefly attained progress has to be reinvented slowly and painfully. And it can always be fought against, denied, diminished by "it's not in the records" arguments. Look up Magnus Hirscchfeld, the Edict of Torda, matelotage. We live in a Golden Age of information availability. Notice how carefully that availability is being sabotaged with fake "privacy protections" and very real power/ownership consolidations.

Matelotage is most relevant to our story, though, because most of y'all ain't heard of this gay marriage from the seventeenth century, yet two of the throuple we're following in this story are matelots. Vitya and Everard are bound in this union and are pretty good at using its spousal-equivalent privilege. Sex, when they get around to TALKING TO EACH OTHER about it, is very much part of the matelotage as we can feel sure it was for others in this and earlier eras.

My main reason for offering only four stars for this very creative and quite interesting story is that not-talking thing was done with such ridiculous and flimsy excuses...honor, the one person not allowing the other to finish a sentence, etc...that I slammed my Kindle shut so many times I worried I'd cracked the screen. Once or maybe twice...okay, especially in the early stages of figuring each other out, or just discovering them. But every time? Every topic? No one, not once, saying "listen to me, please." If that's y'all's experience of being in love, stick to novels, it's just too bleak to be borne in your life.

And not novels like this one that smash the same pathological communication style *after* the love's been established.

As endings go, this one's a humdinger. The last 20% of this story would not let me out of my chair. I got so excited as the throuple withstood the stress test of the awful betrayals!

A good, not quite excellent, love story that offers real rewards for yearning romantics.

THE BALLAD OF JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE, ladypirates who love ladies

THE BALLAD OF JACQUOTTE DELAHAYE
BRIONY CAMERON
Atria Books
$28.99 hardcover, available romorrow

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: This epic, dazzling tale based on true events illuminates a woman of color’s rise to power as one of the few purported female pirate captains to sail the Caribbean, and the forbidden love story that will shape the course of history.

In the tumultuous town of Yáquimo, Santo Domingo, Jacquotte Delahaye is an unknown but up-and-coming shipwright. Her dreams are bold but her ambitions are bound by the confines of her life with her self-seeking French father. When her way of life and the delicate balance of power in the town are threatened, she is forced to flee her home and become a woman on the run along with a motley crew of refugees, including a mysterious young woman named Teresa.

Jacquotte and her band become indentured servants to the infamous Blackhand, a ruthless pirate captain who rules his ship with an iron fist. As they struggle to survive his brutality, Jacquotte finds herself unable to resist Teresa despite their differences. When Blackhand hatches a dangerous scheme to steal a Portuguese shipment of jewels, Jacquotte must rely on her wits, resourcefulness, and friends to survive. But she discovers there is a grander, darker scheme of treachery at play, and she ultimately must decide what price she is willing to pay to secure a better future for them all.

An unforgettable tale told in three parts, The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye is a thrilling, buccaneering escapade filled with siege and battle, and is also a tender exploration of friendship, love, and the search for freedom and home.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think this is a story of two halves: the first half, a survival story rooted firmly in its rime and place; the second more of a fantasy fulfillment that didn't follow the rules of the first half.

The delights, so to speak, of feeling transported to the slave economy of Santo Domingo, there to meet Jacquotte and see the milieu she was destined to live in...many. The characters, the situations, the atmosphere of the town, were all set up sufficiently clearly that I invested in them. That's most of the battle in my reading world. So I was rockin' along, expecting a five, or at worst high-four, star read.

Then came the twenty-first century.

Jacquotte and company all start having very modern conversations about rights and feelings and equality. I suspect this is not realistic not because we haven't seen it before...the cultural conversation has been dominated by the white oppressors for millennia, how would it get reported?...but because this woman and her cohorts have, until now, behaved and spoken more or less like the period demands. The shift was the jarring part, not what was shifted to.

There's action, there's love, there's a lot to like. When we go off into the second half's fantasia, it's still a good read with swashes being buckled and derring being done. It just wasn't congruent with the first half. They're both enjoyable, make no mistake. I'm glad I read the story. I'm glad to get to know Jacquotte.

Be better prepared to suspend disbelief than I was and get even more out of the story.br />