Sea Star: Private Life of Anne Bonny

Though not the most accurate nor eloquent novel, Sea Star is certainly an enjoyable swashbuckling read. Unfortunately, it is a romance novel before historical fiction, so the dialogue and descriptions are sometimes mediocre, but Ms. Jekel's depiction of Anne Bonny is, in my opinion, suburb, portraying the imitable Anne Bonny as the strong, overbearing, reckless, but admirable heroine we know her -- not like Anne Osborne's horribly weak and infactual characterization in 'Wind from the Main' -- and a relief from the heady tomes written recently by Jo Stanley and Ulrike Klausmann, with their /currently/ infactual claims and lack of evidence. Nonetheless, don't read Sea Star if you're looking for scholarly work on Ms. Bonny. It is purely a novel to read before bed, but a deliciously decadent one at that.

I love this book, as I am obsessed with Anne herself, and have owned a copy of it since 1985. However, this book is in too many places a word-for-word repeat of John Carlova's book, Mistress of the Seas, which is Jekel's "principal source of research," and which I recently read a year ago. That's why Sea Star rates a "9" rather than a "10" in my book. This does not make it a bad book--- on the contrary! Jekel changes a number of "facts" from Carlova's book to make the story her own, but it is a wonderfully possible view of Anne's life as Anne herself might have liked it to be.