Finally, months later, I got around to reading the third book in this series. I reviewed the first two here and here, and apparently I can’t decide on a title for the series. (My draft of this has it called “The Adventures of Jacky Faber.”) In any case, L. A. Meyer is American, male, and possessed of a stint in the Navy, which undoubtedly provided him with at least a little of his knowledge of seafaring. He also has an M.F.A. in painting, and had lived for a while on a houseboat. Jacky Faber was inspired by a lot of what-ifs posed about the main characters of a couple of British songs from the nineteenth century.

Since the summary of this book is nearly impossible without revealing various plot elements of the previous volumes, I shall hide it behind the cut. Having just escaped Boston and the awful school she was forced to attend, Jacky Faber hitches a ride back to England and tries to find her beloved Jaimy. Unfortunately, she sees him with another woman, and immediately gets the wrong idea. While running away, she’s pressed into the Navy, and the captain doesn’t care that she’s female. Well, that’s not totally accurate: he cares, because he would very much like to bed her, but he puts her into the records as Midshipman Faber, anyway. Will she survive the Captain’s advances? Will she ever see James Emerson Fletcher again?

One of my readers commented that this was his/her favorite book, and I can see why. This book is on a boat again, rather than in an all-girls school. Furthermore, this is where we first see pirates — or, rather, where Jacky first actually flirts with being a pirate. The whole series, of course, has been hinting at pirates, but now we see them and the Jolly Roger (as the title might indicate). Other characters we knew and loved from the first volume make triumphant returns, including Liam Delaney (who taught her to play pennywhistle) and, yes, we even see Jaimy for a while. Not that the new characters — including an eight-year-old midshipman, Georgie, and a couple of Liam’s children — aren’t just as delightful as any we’ve met so far, but still.

Jacky’s adventures are just as crazy and unbelievable as ever. The ship that takes her from Boston to England is a whaler, called — get this — the Pequod. Yeah, we see “Call me” Ishmael briefly, and Captain Ahab (and his craze for a certain whale) is mentioned. She may or may not escape the Captain’s advances in a similarly mind-stretching fashion, and then, towards the end of the book, she is involved in one of the most seminal events in British naval history. (Astute readers, calculating the date, will know what I mean.) Despite all that, the story rides just this edge of believable, and of course we’re all rooting for Jacky to do well in life — to get the guy (whoever he is at the moment), to escape the danger, to win the money, and most of all, to come up with the most outrageous plan possible.

Readers who were annoyed with Jacky’s dialect in the first volume and perhaps not interested in the second will find the third much more to their liking. She only employs the dialect in the occasional situation while playacting, or once in a while in her own thoughts. While the novel spans 518 pages (in my version), it reads awfully quickly; I think I finished it in the span of four or five hours. (Well, I do read quickly no matter the work.) I am definitely looking forward to the other two volumes still sitting on my shelves; I think there’s still a good deal of room for Jacky to have adventures before crossing the line into ridiculous. 4/5 stars.