THE FINAL CURSE OF OPHELIA CRAY

Two sisters find themselves and each other on the high seas.

Sixteen-year-old Ophelia Young has never felt at home on the island of Peu Jolie, where she lives with her father, stepmother, and anxious half sister, Betsy. She’s ostracized because of her resemblance to her absent birth mother, the “cursed” pirate queen Ophelia Cray. After witnessing Cray’s hanging, Ophelia steals her sister’s identity and joins the Imperial Navy, hoping to make a new life for herself. When their father dies while Ophelia is away, Betsy vows to find her and bring her home. The chapters, told in the third person, alternate between following Betsy and Ophelia as they chart their own courses of self-discovery, and the story is filled with sadistic pirates, mutinous crews, and newfound friendships. The clunky, unpolished prose is frequently cringeworthy, however, filled with awkward similes, self-conscious dialogue, and excessive telling rather than showing. Ophelia, who has “wild curls” and “light olive” skin, is coded as aromantic and asexual; Betsy, who has “blond hair,” “rosy cheeks,” and “an appealing roundness,” is agoraphobic. Betsy’s male love interest is this fictional world’s equivalent of South Asian. While it’s exciting to see characters with these underrepresented identities having high-seas adventures, the weak prose undermines this strength. Readers looking for diverse stories of swashbuckling ladies should pick up Mackenzi Lee’s The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy or C.B. Lee’s A Clash of Steel instead.

Skip this one for more seaworthy tales.