An adventure novel, a history lesson, a love story, a cook book, and a whole lot of fun. Really well written, with no sentimentality mucking up the narrative. These are not pirates with hearts of gold (“TO THE BOTTOM!”), and Owen Wedgewood is such a whiner and so determinedly blind to what is going on around him that I felt the sixty pages after Mabbot makes an entrance worthy of Darth Vader could have been edited down to ten. But after that, the action makes a slam-bang-pow! reappearance and Wedge gets his consciousness raised and how.
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