{"id":160,"date":"2008-01-09T07:32:52","date_gmt":"2008-01-09T11:32:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/?p=160"},"modified":"2008-05-01T10:07:48","modified_gmt":"2008-05-01T14:07:48","slug":"bloody-jack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/bloody-jack\/","title":{"rendered":"Bloody Jack"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday the teen book groups met, and my group discussed L.A. Meyer’s Bloody Jack<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Though they’re usually a very talkative group, there were many silences in the course of this book discussion, and towards the end of the meeting we all agreed that perhaps that was because there just isn’t too much to discuss in Bloody Jack<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Not one of us had a strong opinion either for or against the book, which is rare.<\/p>\n

What is Bloody Jack<\/em>?\u00c2\u00a0 Set in 1797 – 1799, it’s a tale about a young orphaned girl who has lived on the streets since the death of her parents and sister from the plague, begging for food with the company of a gang of fellow orphans.\u00c2\u00a0 When the leader of the gang is murdered, Mary decides to take on his identity (strips his body naked and steals his clothes) and go to sea as a boy in order to get off the streets and leave that life behind her.\u00c2\u00a0 Since she can read, she’s taken on by a Royal Navy ship as a ship’s boy, and embarks on a two year journey living a life of deception as she bonds with the other ship’s boys (falling in love with one of them), learns the workings of a ship, beats the ship’s drum during battles with pirates, fends off a would-be rapist, and kills two men – one the rapist, one a pirate.\u00c2\u00a0 After a particularly bloody battle with a pirate, the battle-scarred ship is close to sinking and must be beached on the shore of a deserted island.\u00c2\u00a0 Through an odd plot twist that involves Mary (known on the ship as Jack, or Jacky) being strapped to a large kite and unintentionally flown to another island, Mary\/Jack becomes the hero of the ship.\u00c2\u00a0 She leads her shipmates to the island, which has the wood needed to repair the ship, and somehow the evil pirate shows up, too, and her shipmates are able to kill the pirate while rescuing her and discovering that she is a woman.\u00c2\u00a0 After this discovery, the captain determines that Mary\/Jack will be put off in Boston and sent to a boarding school for young ladies.<\/p>\n

I had expected a rollicking good read when I picked up this book, but was surprised by Meyer’s preoccupation with Mary\/Jack’s sexual development.\u00c2\u00a0 After a hundred pages or so, I was pretty sick of hearing about how she dealt with the unknown of menstruation and the deception of peeing in\u00c2\u00a0the head on an all-male\u00c2\u00a0ship when you’re not a man.\u00c2\u00a0 Yes, these details needed to be smoothed out and addressed in order for the book to “work,” but enough already.\u00c2\u00a0 More action, please!\u00c2\u00a0 And I truly disliked the subplot of Mary\/Jack’s love for her fellow ship’s boy Jaimy, a love that ultimately is returned when Jaimy learns of her true identity.\u00c2\u00a0 There was something about Mary\/Jack’s discussion of her hormonally charged feelings for and encounters with Jaimy that creeped me out, frankly.\u00c2\u00a0 Blech.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

So the book fell flat for me, and didn’t thrill the teen book group.\u00c2\u00a0 Not that we hated it, or anything…it just didn’t capture our hearts and attention.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Next up for this group, thanks to K.’s excellent suggestion:\u00c2\u00a0 The Golden Compass <\/em>by Philip Pullman.\u00c2\u00a0 If the movie is still in theaters, Jim and I will have an excuse to go to the movies, too!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday the teen book groups met, and my group discussed L.A. Meyer’s Bloody Jack.\u00c2\u00a0 Though they’re usually a very talkative group, there were many silences in the course of this book discussion, and towards the end of the meeting we all agreed that perhaps that was because there just isn’t too much to discuss in … Continue reading Bloody Jack<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-groups","category-young-adult-book-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/abbykingsbury.org\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}