Stormy Seas. Living Gales. Rotten Meat. Weevily Biscuits. Scurvy Pirates. Cannonballs. Cruel Officers. Vile Bosun’s mates. Shipwrecks. Floggings. Keelhaulings. Blood in the Scuppers.

But, hey, sometimes a girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

The Bloody Jack series by L. A. Meyer is labeled Young Adult, but makes good reading for any age. The series shines for two particular reasons. The first is the lead character, Mary “Jacky” Faber (AKA the Jackeroe, aka La Belle Jeune Fille Sans Merci, aka Queen of the Ocean Sea), who starts out as a starving street urchin in London around 1800, and who, in an attempt to survive, disguises herself as a boy to win a spot as a Ship’s Boy on a Royal Navy frigate. As the point-of-view character, Jacky has an engaging voice and a brilliant personality. Crafty, clever, honest (sometimes), and good (mostly), she rings true in every way, and even when Jacky is at her worst, you’re on her side.

The other strong point of the series is the way Meyer captures places and times. Jacky’s London is the real, gritty city of that time, and Meyer’s descriptions of life on a Royal Navy frigate are not only accurate but also convey the feel of being underway under sail. That’s no small accomplishment, and Meyer keeps to it as the series continues and Jacky’s adventures bring her into contact with many places, events and historical personages, either on her own or through her friends and repeatedly-unconsummated love interest, Jaimy.

How could a girl become a Midshipman in His Majesty’s Navy? Meyer makes it believable and plausible in Bloody Jack. Her secret discovered, Jacky is forced into the horrible fate of learning to be a lady in a Boston school for girls in Curse of the Blue Tattoo, where her experience as a sailor in the Royal Navy causes a few problems. Fleeing Boston with the city in flames behind her, Jacky returns to England, and in Under the Jolly Roger gets pressed into service on another Royal Navy ship while once again disguised as a boy. Through a series of credible events she gets promoted to Lieutenant and ends up in command of the ship for a brief period before embarking on a lucrative career as a privateer. A not-amused Royal Navy captures her in time for an appearance at the Battle of Trafalgar.

Once again on the run, Jacky returns to the girls’ school in Boston to hide out, only to be kidnapped by slavers along with the rest of the young ladies (In the Belly of the Bloodhound). Can Jacky figure out how to get herself and the other girls to freedom and inflict some vengeance on the slavers in the process? But after yet another escape from the Royal Navy, whose intelligence service has taken an avid interest in her, Jacky has to avoid recapture by heading into the great American frontier, eventually commanding a river boat stolen from Mike Fink himself in Mississippi Jack, as she clashes with river pirates, renegades and the occasional British agent.

In the sixth book of the series, My Bonny Light Horseman, she’s trapped by British Intelligence and forced to go into France as a spy. Once there, things do not go according to the plans of the British authorities, and Jacky finds herself again disguised as a man, this time as an officer in Napoleon’s army on its way to the battle of Jena. Awkward. Having escaped once more and been recaptured yet again, the seventh book, Rapture of the Deep, finds Jacky this time forced to help His Majesty’s government loot a sunken Spanish treasure ship in the Caribbean.

The adventures may seem fantastic, but everything is grounded in the times in which the stories are set. There are no anachronisms here, either technological or social. Jacky’s unusual and unconventional behaviors are explained by her experiences and her temperament. Moreover, Meyer doesn’t shy from the dark underbelly of his stories. Orphans starve or are murdered in the uncaring streets of London. Battle is an exciting but bloody business, with friends dying and even the deaths of enemies done in the name of duty or necessity. Jacky has a particular loathing of slavery in any form, which brings her into conflict with (among others) the Lafitte brothers.

The series manages to be both fun and realistic, thanks to Jacky’s personality and Meyer’s attention to historical detail, as well as his ability to recreate not only the facts of a place and time, but also the feel of them.

  -- John G. Hemry