*I was given a copy of My Salty Mary in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to HarperCollins and the authors for my copy of the book*

Synopsis:

Don’t call this mermaid “little”—call her “captain,” unless you want to walk the plank.

Mary is in love with the so-called prince of Charles Town, except he doesn’t love her back. Which is inconvenient. Since she’s a mermaid, being brokenhearted means she’ll—poof!—turn into sea-foam.

But instead, Mary finds herself pulled out of the sea and up onto a pirate ship. To survive, she joins them. But Mary isn’t willing to just sing the yo-ho-hos. She wants the pirate life, all of it, and she’s ready to make a splash . . . by becoming captain. But when Blackbeard dies suddenly, Mary has a chance to become so much more: Pirate King . . . or Queen. She won’t let anyone stop her—not Blackbeard’s cute son, not her best friend from back under the sea who’s having a bit too much fun with his new legs, and certainly not everyone who says she can’t be a pirate just because she’s a girl.

She may not be the best man for the job, but she’ll definitely prove that she’s worth her salt.

Review:

When I first saw My Salty Mary had three authors I was a little wary about the quality of writing. Thankfully, this wasn’t something I needed to worry about. The tone and quality of the writing was consistent throughout. Which is fairly impressive given this book has three authors, who I assume wrote one POV each.

I love a retelling, we all know this by now, and My Salty Mary was a really great one, although it’s not an outright retelling, so don’t expect to see an evil sea witch and a handsome prince. It pulls from multiple stories for inspiration and plot events, but the The Little Mermaid parts were my favourite, as this was one of my favourite stories as a kid – the original version and the Disney one. 

Some of the dialogue that was used to reference other mediums (at one point the “don’t let go Jack” line from Titanic was used) was pretty funny most of the time. But some were a little forced and made me cringe just a tiny bit. These were easy to overlook though as the action was so fun.

I also really loved the “narrators” talking directly to the reader. At first, I thought these would take me out of the story and get annoying, but they were great. They added personality to the book and the tidbits of history were fun to read. I didn’t really know anything about real pirates before reading My Salty Mary and now I feel like I’ve learnt quite a lot.

Apparently, I love pirate books, which isn’t something I knew about myself until recently. Well, I like the ones that aren’t too brutal. This one definitely had elements you’d expect from a book back then (racism, sexism, slavery), but as the authors said themselves, they didn’t want to erase these parts of history so they have been included but they made them slightly lighter. I personally think they handled these topics in a considered manner.

I really liked all of the main characters. Mary was strong-willed and her development from the first chapter to end of the book was incredible – we love a strong woman. Speaking of strong women, Anne Bonny was by far my favourite character. I don’t know anything about the real life Anne Bonny, but this one was incredible. She was bloodthirsty and hilarious, two traits that make a great character if you ask me.

Every character had a distinct personality that came across in their dialogue and actions no matter which perspective you were reading and they were all just super fun and likeable. 

I would highly recommend checking out My Salty Mary if you love funny, fairly light hearted books about pirates. It has a lot of pop culture references and the writing feels very fresh.

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