Under the Jolly Roger by L.A. Meyer

After a long hiatus, I finally got my hands on the next book of the Bloody Jack series! If you forgot what it's about, you can read my reviews of book one and book two here.

Before I even talk about the book, can I just say that's it's getting tough to figure out the order of the books? "The adventures of..." was clearly the first, and "The further adventures" is clearly the second, but it gets confusing from this book onwards. I basically had to search for the list of books page (which didn't even give numbers) to try to guess that this was the third book. Thank goodness for the Internet, which will have things like "Bloody Jack #1/2/3/4/etc"

In the third book, Jacky has been kicked out of the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls, and goes back to London to find Jaimy. Unfortunately, due a series of unfortunate coincidences, she gets the impression that Jaimy is faithless and runs away, getting press-ganged and embarking on a new adventure, eventually leading into our dear Jacky becoming a Privateer. Don't worry, I didn't give away any spoilers.

Under the Jolly Roger is as wacky as the first two, and probably has more drama than the rest. At times, Jacky comes close to being a Mary Sue, what with how perfect a sailor she can be, but thankfully she messes up on a regular basis. This book has a lot of great supporting characters too - Jacky's 'father' from the first book returns, and then there's Higgins, who is like the perfect butler, and who I hope will appear in many many more books.

My only complaint about the book is that I'm starting to get sick of the Jacky/Jaimy romance thing. Jaimy is a nice boy, but they haven't met in ages! They don't even get the letters they send each other! And in this book, Jacky has what can be called romances, with another boy, and I was really rooting for them. Sometimes, I feel like Jaimy only exists to let the reader know how other people apart from Jacky are doing - sometimes, Jacky leaves people behind, and Jaimy's letters let us know what happens (and what is going to happen to Jacky, sometimes).

I'm still enjoying this series. I can't say it's the perfect series (see the paragraph above), but I'm having a lot of fun reading it, and I'll definitely continue reading.