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.

Read with the kids. Possibly a bit too wordy for a nearly 6 year old but they both listened and engaged with it.

I was really keen to read another by Benjamin Myers after the masterpiece of Pig Iron. The Gallows Pole has recently been made into a TV series and I'm rarely one to watch before I read, so this jumped to the top of my tbr pile.

It's got that tone and vernacular that I'm already identifying as Myers. Every word feels deliberately chosen for its lyricism but somehow never feels out of place or forced.

It's another violent offering here, but given the subject it's not surprising.

It's only a 4 star as I found it much slower and slightly harder to get into at the start. There isn't really anyone to root for, everyone's a bastard in this one to be honest.

But there is the same reverence for the land here, and this novel is an ode to the moors as much as a tale of the men that made their lives there. And it's glorious to read.

I should think I'll be reading some more of his work again this year.

I really really liked this. I was unsure at the beginning, the dialogue felt a bit forced and clumsy. The interesting premise kept me going and the dialogue settled and the characters got a bit less cliched.

I found it pretty hard to read in parts, having a 4 yo son myself.

It was an easy read and you could take as much from it as you wanted - the plot was novel and interesting and was enough on its own without delving any deeper. But if you wanted to take something more ponderous from it then that was there for you, in themes around the afterlife, reincarnation, karma and the nature of souls.

I wasn't sure how I felt about this one but I've mulled and I think it's a maybe a 3.5. Unsurprisingly it's fairly bleak but the narrator is never asking you to feel sorry for her. The review on the back talks about loving and hating the parents but I don't know what there was to love, they were despicable, irresponsible people. It's great that all the kids got out and away and didn't fall into the same cycle as their parents.

Having no contact with my own father, and feeling pretty black and white about a lot of moral issues that others would consider grey, I cannot get my head around the constant allowances that they gave their parents once they moved to New York, but I do understand the guilt.

Not a holiday read, but an interesting musing on relationships with problematic parents.

This was a tantalising read. I admit that I went into it knowing that it was a good old unreliable narrator affair but that didn't spoil the appreciation.

I suspected the denouement early on but this didn't remotely detract from the rest of the novel - it was fun to pick out the clues that confirmed my thoughts.

There are many other parts of this novel that remain ambiguous, or that I didn't pick up on. Relationships are strange, heightened by the dialogue which has a halting character perhaps sounding like it might if translated from Japanese (I don't think it was, I'm sure it was originally written in English). There was so much more I wanted to know.

The end was both excellent and disappointing because I appreciated the lack of elucidation - I still had so many questions! Did I want answers or am I happy to go on wondering?

A DNF for me. I couldn't get into this. I gave it 81 pages. The writing didn't pull me in. It felt really contrived. I didn't find any of the characters interesting. Potentially a decent plot but I couldn't wade through the painful characterisation of Mary Cyr.

This book was absolute drivel. Reminded of The Pilgrims Progress a bit and that's all I need to say about that.

I don't feel like I can give this a bad review really. I don't think there was anything wrong with it. In fact it's well researched etc. Maybe I'm not in the right place for reading it just now. I found it a bit dull. Not usual for me. Perhaps I'll try it again another time.

I didn't get a chapter into this book before I stopped reading it. Why does she call everyone by their full name the whole time. Apparently, that's a bug bear I can't get past.