Young adult pirate fantasy novel, written by Tanith Lee and published by Dutton Juvenile Books in the United Kingdom and by Firebird Fantasy in the United States in 2003. It is subtitled "Being a Daring Tale of a Singular Girl's Adventures Upon the High Seas." "Piratica" was followed by two sequels. "Piratica II: Return to Parrot Island" was published in 2006, and "Piratica III: The Family Sea" was published in 2007. That third book was only released in the United Kingdom -- an American edition has never been released.
Please meet Miss Artemesia Fitz-Willoughby Weatherhouse, a young lady attending finishing school in Free England. In the very first paragraph, she falls down a staircase, bumps her head, and recovers her memories of her mother, Molly Faith, the pirate queen known as Piratica, who was killed by an exploding cannon. The same explosion also caused Artemesia's six-year-long bout of amnesia -- but now that she's recovered her memory, she displays a love for piracy and swashbuckling that deeply alarms her teachers and her tyrannical father, and she's locked away in an unused ballroom.
She escapes confinement easily, waylays a young traveler named Felix Phoenix (and accidentally gets him mis-identified as a notorious highwayman), changes her name to Art Blastside, and makes her way to the city of Lundon to track down her mother's old pirate crew from her ship, the Unwelcome Stranger. She finally finds them all in a tavern -- they are Ebad Vooms, Eerie O'Shea, Dirk, Whuskery, Salt Peter, Salt Walter, the Honest Liar, and Black Knack, along with Muck, the Cleanest Dog in England (he is actually incredibly dirty), and Plunqwette, a parrot that used to belong to Molly Faith and tends to say stock pirate phrases -- but sometimes says very, very mysterious things.
They then tell her two things Art can barely bring herself to believe. First, that they now work as coffee salesmen, sailing up and down the Thames in their rinky-dink ship advertising Pirate Coffee. Second, that they are not pirates, her mother was not a pirate, they were never pirates, they were just actors acting out popular pirate plays for the theater-going public in Lundon. Art travels with them aboard their Pirate Coffee ship on their way to the next city down the river -- and then surprises everyone first by declaring herself captain, then by taking in the fugitive Felix Phoenix as crew, and finally by stealing a merchant ship, not by force of arms but through guile and trickery. Now sailing on the new Unwelcome Stranger, Art and her crew of actors (somehow expert sailors and pirates despite claiming to have never gone to sea and never engaged in piracy) set sail to plunder the Seven Seas.
But piracy isn't all fun and games, and when Art and the crew of the Unwelcome Stranger cross swords with Little Goldie Girl, daughter of the notorious and murderous Golden Goliath, captain of the Enemy, it could jeopardize their search for the legendary Treasured Isle. And if they can't identify the secret betrayer in their midst, Art could be dragged back to Free England to dance the hempen jig.
In her afterword for this book, Tanith Lee says she'd been interested in pirates and sailing ships since she was nine years old, but only decided to finally sit down and write a novel about pirates in 2001, inspired by female pirate captains like Grace O'Malley. And spending most of a lifetime loving stories about pirates clearly worked out well for Lee, because this was a wonderful, rollicking story from start to finish.
Does the plot meander? Yes, it does. Once Art gets her hands on the new Unwelcome Stranger, she and her crew sail all over the world, meeting new pirates, beating new pirates, trying to find the Treasured Isle, meeting old members of Molly's crew, getting becalmed, finding the island, solving its puzzles, running into old enemies, etc., etc., etc. But I also feel like you can't have a pirate story without meandering. It's the nature of sailing ships to meander, drifting through the waves, driven by the wind, guided by stars. You wouldn't expect any pirate story to travel straight from Point A to Point B with no twists and turns, and Lee's book takes full advantage of that, giving us a tale that roams across oceans and all over the world.
Characterization is really fun, too. Art, obviously, gets the most attention -- our lead character is clever, brave, ballsy as hell, and devoted to her memories of her mother. She's both trusting and suspicious -- she figures out fairly early that someone on her crew is working against her, and while she shows some paranoia about who it might be, she also clearly decides she can't afford to treat everyone on her crew as a potential suspect, so decides to err on the side of trusting most of the crew. Other characters who get a lot of focus are Ebad Vooms, Felix Phoenix, and Little Goldie Girl, with many of the rest of the pirates getting fairly light characterization -- enough to give you a hint of their personalities, but not enough to have them overwhelm the rest of the characters. A lot of them are there mostly as comic relief, though they all get their dramatic moments. And they also get enough time in the spotlight to make sure you worry that any of them could be the traitor...
The "pirate fantasy" setting also helps make the book interesting and readable. The story starts in an England that overthrew the monarchy some years back and is now known as Free England. Its largest city is called Lundon, and its highborn aristocrats are now known as landsirs. The Americas are known as the Amer Ricas, Spain is Franco-Spania, the Caribbean is the Blue Indies, and Madagascar is Mad-Agash Scar. And the story begins in the year Seventeen-Twelvety. The pirate world is a lot more organized and stable, too -- and significantly more magical. The crew of the Unwelcome Stranger run into plenty of odd and fortuitous coincidences, but the uncanny atmosphere really cranks up when they finally locate the Treasured Isle. The island's geography is bizarre, seemingly designed solely to shelter pirate treasure. Plunqwette and the parrots of the island are far more intelligent than even real-world parrots, and their intelligence is vital for unraveling the puzzles at the heart of the island.
In short, I loved this book so damn much. I very much wanted to read it all the time. I wanted to take it to work. I wanted to stay up late reading it. I actually wasn't able to read it all the time because I had a ton of things I needed to do -- but if I'd been able to, I likely would've finished reading it within a couple days. The plot, the characters, the swashbuckling action all helped make it an absolute pleasure to read. It's out of print now, so you may have to do some hunting to find a used copy -- but if you love great pirate stories, you should try to pick this one up.