This is a strange book all the facts don't follow history at. A lot of time was spent explaining nautical jargon and the story is so slow I didn't finish it. I was furnished a copy of the book by NetGalley for my honest review.

3.5

This tall ships adventure, set in 1813, is the third in a series, but I found no difficulty in catching up with earlier events, as the author wove in plenty of backstory.

We meet a mixture of historical personages and fictional; our heroine is a fictional granddaughter of George III, and our hero a surgeon, good friend to “Fly” Austen. When I saw the name, I thought, can this be one of Jane Austen’s brothers? Sure enough, the elder of the two nautical brothers is another main character.

After a series of adventures in the previous novels, Fly Austen, sent to fight against the Americans in what we in the USA call the War of 1812 (but for the British it was yet another complication in the generation of war beginning with France, including Spain and Mediterranean pirates, among others), is commanded return to sea while undermanned, which means impressing sailors.

Austen convinces his surgeon friend Leander Braden to accompany him one last time. Meanwhile, the princess Emily, fearing she will be left behind in Portsmouth, disguises herself as a man and steals aboard Fly’s frigate in order to escape the reprehensible lord chasing her in order to bully her into marriage with a loathsome marquis.

There are a couple of appealing teen characters who get into all kinds of trouble, one of them, a one-eyed boy named Magpie, being captured by another press gang and hustled aboard a ship, to discover a villain from the earlier adventures, living under a false name.

Readers familiar with Patrick O’Brian’s terrific roman fleuve about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin will inevitably find influence in other tall ship tales. It shows here, though Cooper’s narrative is far more Dickensian, with colorful characters, and a lot of grotty emphasis on the unsavoury details of portside life, and then—once they set sail—shipboard life.

Readers wanting ship to ship battles might be disappointed in this tale, as it takes a while for them to put to sea, and then the ship to ship action is largely offscreen, but there is certainly plenty of character interaction, threat, danger, blood, and guts. The female characters hold their own in a (necessarily) largely male cast—I loved Aunt Eliza, and Emily is an appealing heroine.

It’s a fun read, and though there are some grammar oopses, Cooper does a good job with period idiom and outlook.

This is a Net Galley ARC that I have received in exchange for my review and I don't think they are going to like this one. They want objectivity so I will give it to them. I did not like this book. To begin it is historic fiction set in 1813 during the Age of Fighting Sail as well as the War of 1812. If an author is going to write historic fiction I absolutely insist that the history be accurate and that the story and the characters have a meaningful and plausible interaction with the history. This author apparently believes that history is something that can be altered to fit her story plot. In this book, which is part of a series which I have no desire to get involved with, the author has fabricated a heroine that is the granddaughter of King George III of England. George had only 2 granddaughters to my knowledge, Charlotte, daughter of the Prince Regent, who died in early adulthood and Victoria who went on to become the Queen of England for most of the 19th century. There is no excuse for flagrantly altering historic fact as this story certainly didn't require it. Further, while the author has little if any knowledge of sailing or life in the British Navy during this period she does seem to have an affection for Jane Austen and has grafted Ms Austen and her family on to this drawing room melodrama. The author has made Jane Austen's brother who was a real British naval officer during this period and made him a main character in the book but without involving Jane or her writing in the plot. So I guess this was nothing more than a little literary name-dropping. Finally, if you, like me, are a fan of the Age of Fighting Sail genre books you will most sadly disappointed. While the book does take place during that period and the story does take place onboard ship it is not a work appropriate to that genre. It takes nearly half the book for the story to move out to sea and then almost 75% of the book is exhausted before there is any naval action and then that action takes place in the background or offstage to the primary story. So what about the primary story.

The plot of this book is a routine, predictable, and dull. It requires the reader to accept that a main character would be incapable of the most rudimentary human behavior because if he hadn't the story would completely unravel in short order. The author's ignorance of the sea is evidenced by the author's notes in which she found it necessary to itemize a list of nautical and historic terms that which might be unknown to her readers. These terms are all in common usage in books of the genre this one aspires to and their definition should become apparent by the context in which they are used in the story but that context is rarely adequately supplied. But what is the story about? Since I have not read the previous books in this series I can only describe what is revealed in this book. A royal princess is being forced into an arranged marriage that she rejects. She runs away from home and ends up at sea and is involved in some previous adventures where she meets most of the characters in this book. There is also a villain that is now wanted for treason by the crown. After everybody returns to England is where the start of this story begins. The princess is in hiding from her family with the help of a young ship's surgeon that she has met during the previous adventures. The princess' family finds her and is attempting to return her to her duties as a princess but she escapes and ends up back at sea with the doctor, with whom she is in love with, and Captain Austen and many of the friends she has made in those same prior events. How this story unfolds will surprise no one but will surprise you is that the story ends in a cliffhanger which I find insulting. Cliffhangers are nothing but cheap devices to boost book sales. If an author is good then such tricks are unnecessary as your work will bring readers back. As for this cliffhanger I feel no curiosity to see how the story ends. The predictability of this plot doesn't leave room for a lot of mystery.