A Book A Week - Week 36: The Last Buccaneer

This week's book:
  The Last Buccaneer   by Lynn Erickson

Grade:  B

Dear God in Heaven and all the saints besides, this is yet another book set in Florida.  I can't get away from America's wang.  Maybe I'll just punch out my own teeth, grow a mullet, cultivate an oxycontin habit and move there.

Anyway... about the book.  I was surprised.  Honestly, pleasantly surprised.  This is a romance, sure, but it's also a time travel story.

Say what?

Yup, time travel.  Both into the past and then back into the future.  Here's the setup: a young woman - because it's a romance, natch - who's doing her Master's in Spanish history comes across a misfiled document that points to the true location of a shipwreck, a treasure shipwreck, that people have been after for four hundred years.  She dives on the wreck, touches a necklace, and is transported back in time, where she's rescued by a Spanish slave ship.  She's rescued from that Hellish vessel by a dashing one-eyed English privateer, who also frees the slaves and is generally an honest, forthright man - again, because it's a romance - who mistakes her for a cabin boy.  Yes, boy.  At least for a while.

I have to say, the set up and plot were not what I expected.  The 'romance' waters have been decidedly muddied by Fifty Shades of Porn, and I suppose I thought I'd find more of that kind of thing rather than the well-researched historical novel I got.  Like I said, pleasantly surprised.

If only the dialogue and pacing had been better, I might have graded it higher.
   Absent dialogue the narrative was tight and crisp.  For instance, the opening scene in the prologue is absolutely riveting, as are most scenes set in the past that have to do with ships and combat and what have you.  When the authors* switch to scenes involving people, however, things slow down  A lot.  There are a lot of sarcastic asides, arched eyebrows, misunderstood anachronisms, heaving sobs, you get the idea.  Didn't do it for me.
  Then there was the pacing.  More accurately the pacing at the end of the book.  Up until Tess, the heroine, goes forward to her own time again, the plot worked great.  It was really more of an adventure story with a sex scene than a romance with history.  But once back in Florida the pacing sped up unacceptably.  I felt the authors were thinking through the trouble with a time-displaced privateer Englishman too much, and the narrative suffered because of it.  It was rushed, and felt incomplete.  It was also set in modern Florida and I just hated that.

But, for my first foray into genre romance, not half bad.  If nothing else this book a week exercise is teaching me to let go of my genre snobbery.
  If you're a romance reader, then you should read this one too.  It's kind of old, 1994 (since when is that old?), but I think that's it's strength, there's more story than I think you'd find in a similar book from this year.  If you're not a romance reader... well, I can't say you should read it, since it might be a little too far from what you're used to.  But I think you should at least give it a try. 

* Lynn Erickson is a pen-name for co-authors Carla Peltonen and Molly Swanton 

Next week:
 TekWar   by William Shatner
 Yes, it's that William Shatner.  Don't worry, even though his name's on the cover he didn't really write it, some other guy did.  First published in 1989, the Summer of Public Enemy.  The two really have nothing to do with each other.  I assume, maybe I'm wrong.  I'll know in a week.