We Are Pirates – Daniel Handler
My girls are Lemony Snicket fans – I must admit I have a bit of a soft spot for the movie – so when I heard there were books for grown-ups (I don’t want to say adult books) I was super keen to read it.
Here is the blurb …
Mega-bestselling author Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) gives us his long-awaited and most ambitious novel yet: a dark, rollicking, stunningly entertaining human comedy.
A boat has gone missing. Goods have been stolen. There is blood in the water. It is the twenty-first century and a crew of pirates is terrorizing the San Francisco Bay.
Phil is a husband, a father, a struggling radio producer, and the owner of a large condo with a view of the water. But he’d like to be a rebel and a fortune hunter.
Gwen is his daughter. She’s fourteen. She’s a student, a swimmer, and a best friend. But she’d like to be an adventurer and an outlaw.
Phil teams up with his young, attractive assistant. They head for the open road, attending a conference to seal a deal.
Gwen teams up with a new, fierce friend and some restless souls. They head for the open sea, stealing a boat to hunt for treasure.
We Are Pirates is a novel about our desperate searches for happiness and freedom, about our wild journeys beyond the boundaries of our ordinary lives.
Also, it’s about a teenage girl who pulls together a ragtag crew to commit mayhem in the San Francisco Bay, while her hapless father tries to get her home.
I found it a little confusing at first and I went back and re-read the start, but once it all fell into place I really enjoyed it. To me it seemed to be a modern fable, the children, the old man and the black man would go on an adventure, discover something about themselves and the world around them (that it is fundamentally a good place) and return and get on with their lives – better people for their new self-knowledge, but no this convention is completely turned upside down! Let’s just say not everyone makes it back as a better person. There’s brutality, despair and the breaking up of the team. This might make it sound very dark, but it is a witty and original novel (that’s got to be a good thing) with some surprising elements (well I was surprised).
More reviews …
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/27/we-are-pirates-review-lemony-snicket-but-for-adults