At the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy Blog Ceridwen Christensen tagged 16 essential pirate fantasy novels. One title on the list:
Magic of Blood and Sea, by Cassandra Rose Clarke
Magic of Blood and Sea collects the duology of The Assassin’s Curse and The Pirate’s Wish, which follow the irascible pirate’s daughter Ananna of the Tanarau. She bugs out of her arranged marriage with a rival pirate clan, who then send the assassin Naji after her. She and the assassin inadvertently trigger an impossible curse, one that binds them in an uneasy and inescapable intimacy. Ananna and Naji must sail across the seas and into the most dangerous waters to break their curse. Ananna is a proud, single-minded creature, a product of her life on the water with her pirate parents, and her matriculation has as much to do with the strength of her convictions as it does her ability to trust and let go. A lovely coming of age tale, with pirates!
* * *
Steel, by Carrie Vaughn
Jill is super bummed when she blows an important fencing match. As she sulks on vacation with her parents on a Caribbean island, she 
finds the tip of an old rapier. This artifact transports her back to the deck of an honest-to-goodness 18th Century pirate ship. While in many ways Jill is an expert with a sword, she learns quickly that there’s a difference between the heat of the moment and the sanitized matches she’s been trained for. Like some other books on this list, Vaughn includes such historical pirates as Black Beard, with new characters like the female pirate Captain Cooper mixed in. Historical pirates were a lot less hung up on things like race, class, and gender, and it’s cool to imagine how a pirate captain who is a woman would act.
Read about
the other entries on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
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