A few weeks ago, I found books 1, 3, 4, & 5 of this series at a Borders outlet. Naturally they were all very nice hardbacks, and the only copy I could find of book 2 on a shelf was a paperback. That, of course, wouldn’t do, so I ordered a copy of book 2 from a used bookseller in Maine. It took a ridiculously long time to get here, and considering how much I enjoyed the first book in this series, it was difficult. Of course, right after the book got here, I’d locked myself into reading nothing but ebooks for a week. So here it is: the long-awaited (on my part, at least) review of the second Jacky Faber book. The first one is here.

Due to the novel being set immediately after its preceding volume, I’m cutting the plot discussion. Jacky (Mary) Faber, former street urchin turned English navy ship’s boy, has been outed as a girl and forcibly enrolled in the Lawson Peabody School for Girls in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That school is a school for young ladies of good family (or at least a lot of money), and Jacky doesn’t exactly fit in. *cough* She immediately makes an enemy of Clarissa Worthington Howe (the daughter of a slaveholding family from Virginia), but eventually makes friends with Amy Trevelyne (the bluestocking daughter of a gentleman farmer from Massachusetts). Naturally Jacky isn’t content to remain at the school, and she gets in trouble with the law, with the school, and with the local Congregational minister. Can she get herself out of trouble, and back where she wants to be?

Very early on, Jacky gets more education, and her speech improves. The majority of this book is not in fake dialect, for which I am grateful. However, the majority of it doesn’t take place on a boat, and the majority of the characters in this book are female. While none of that bothered me, I can see how it would bother other readers, primarily male ones, at least in theory. In practice, though, one should remember that the author is male, and the majority of what happens is not ‘girly’ things. For example, Jacky gets arrested for playing pipe in the street, and spends a lot of time sneaking into taverns and pubs. Not exactly embroidery and love letters, eh?

Jacky is still a fantastic character; she rides the line between too ridiculous to believe and extremely entertaining for the entire book. Her escapades are almost too much to believe, but not quite. The historical characters peppered in the novel (including John Adams, Paul Revere, and a descendant of Cotton Mather) also never quite cross the Forrest Gump line. It’s fairly impressive, to me, how close Meyer rides to the line in so many ways, and how he manages to keep Jacky’s story from being (completely) unbelievable. I wanted to believe in Jacky the whole time, and nothing he did betrayed my trust.

This work clocks in at just under 500 pages, making it significantly longer than Bloody Jack. The length may pop the series into YA status, rather than the almost-middle-grade status the first volume had. In any case, I found it just as enjoyable as the first volume, if not more, but I like girls’ boarding school (with a twist) stories and I’m also fond of early-nineteenth-century settings. I’m not entirely sure I would try to read the second volume without reading the first, but readers of book 1 who aren’t thrown by a complete change of location should enjoy Jacky’s madcap adventures in high- and low-society Boston. 4/5 stars.