I really tried to finish this. I was listening on audiobook but I am basically zoning out every 5 minutes because it's SO boring. How do you make a book about female pirates boring? I'll tell ya.

1. You spend almost as much time talking about men.

2. You also spend a lot of time with pointless filler about masts and boats. Did I come for a history of boats? No.

3. You undermine every story with a caveat that it was probably exaggerated or didn't even happen.

4. You struggle to decide what the tone of book is. Am I reading a serious scholarly work that's been well researched or am I reading a blog about the authors general guesswork and story telling?

I'm not sure what this was trying to be or do. There were points where it could have been something more interesting. Instead it's just a 'they did this and then they did that'. There is no real attempt to do anything useful with the information uncovered. It takes no time to reflect on any of the stories and when it does it's clumsy and poorly nuanced. It doesn't make any real commentary on sexism or the systems within which these women were operating. It doesn't feed into larger discussions about society or anything.

Really rubbish actually.