Morgane grew up at sea, daughter of the fierce pirate captain of the Vengeance, raised to follow in her footsteps as scourge of the Four Chains Trading Company. But when Anna-Marie is mortally wounded in battle, she confesses to Morgane that she is not her mother.

The captain of the enemy ship reveals he was paid to kill Anna-Marie and bring Morgane home to France and her real family. Desperate to learn the truth about her lineage, Morgane spares him, leaving the Vengeance and everything she knows behind.

Her quest reveals a world of decadence and darkness, in which monsters vie for control of royal courts and destinies of nations. She discovers the bloody secrets of the Four Chains Trading Company, and the truth about her real mother’s death, nearly twenty years before…

I was reading this ARC on holiday in France where we visited a couple of chateaus that were very much in tune with the worldbuilding that Newman has created in her slightly alternative sixteenth century France. With her protagonist, Morgane, navigating her way towards a  denouement in an opulent, decadent and dangerous masked ball, I found the text very evocative of the Chateau Rochefoucauld in Charente. Developed from a dour medieval keep into its luxurious 1600s heyday, Rochefoucauld is filled with exactly the mix of grandeur and complexity of setting that Newman’s narrative swirls towards, from its magnificent spiral staircase to its plethora of nooks and crannies in which one could imagine Morgane hiding out.

However, Morgane’s story does not begin in such a palace, but instead aboard a pirate ship captained by her acerbic and obsessive mother Anne-Marie. However, as the blurb makes clear, not all is as it seems. Anne-Marie’s compulsive pursuit of the ships of one particular trading company – the Four Chains company – lead her into overreach and disaster, when one ship contrives to fight back.

In the aftermath of that disaster, Morgane becomes aware of secrets and a past she has been kept away from by the aunt she called mother and, curious, she accepts the invitation to abandon her pirate life and accept passage home to France to find out who she really is.

Newman makes a great play out of the contrasting lifestyle of pirate and fine lady and Morgane’s difficulty in making the adjustment. For example, where does one keep all one’s knives in a fine lace gown, and how does one climb ringing in a hooped skirt? The dissonance continues after landing in France, when – after a few missteps – Morgane finds herself being educated by a governess of more or less her own age in matters such as fine dining and bathing.

In keeping with the period setting and the pirate background, Newman’s prose is speckled with lines that mix elegance and more earthy expressions.

When Morgane is leaving her pirate comrades to join the crew that will take her to France

She followed them over, head high, shoulders back, determined to look like someone ready to take on the world, rather than shit through the eye of a needle, as she really felt.

Resting in a chateau

The room overlooked a part of the walled garden, now just muted greys in the rapidly fading light.

Or when advised by an old friend’s mother

She picked up her needle once more – “I’ve found that more good gets done when we look at how to love better, rather than how to fight harder.”

Newman also slips in some interesting social observations into the text.  For example when Morgane is mystified by the wealthy Europeans ostentatious hoarding of wealth for display.

It seemed to Morgane that wealth here in Europe was all about acquiring useless things that gathered dust, just so that other people could look at them and see that the owner was rich enough to buy them. Why exchange gold for all these dull things that brought no pleasure.

It was a world away from her old life, where money always flowed and never got trapped in useless possessions.

It’s fair point that the value of money is in its movement, rather than its possession. A pound in a poor man’s pocket will be spent over and over again in a vibrant cycle of economic activity, rather than growing mouldy in a rich man’s wallet.

Morgane also reflects on the less well-known positives of pirate life.

They only knew about the violence, and the looting. Not the way a crew looked out for each other, nor paid more to those injured, nor ensured that everyone got their fair share under a good captain and could get rid of them if they were not.

To be honest, the violence and looting does seem to be quite a big issue, but a quick google search does suggest pirates had an underrated and unreported fervour for shipboard democracy. However, it is understandable that pirate life would be a chance to break free of Royal Navy type of culture, with harsh discipline, autocratic hierarchies, and a division of prize money that saw the officers get the lion’s share.

Of the characters I warmed most to Lisette, the young governess assigned to educate Morgane in the ways of seventeenth century French life. Morgane herself, although resourceful and suitably feisty, was at times too misdirected in her curiosity for my taste.  This may have been a consequence of the organic nature of the plot. Morgane swiftly gets embroiled in a trail of attempted kidnappings, treachery, deception and violence, which does add a certain pace to the narrative. It has a whirl of activity, scene shifts and character introductions that reminded me a bit of Sadir S. Samir’s The Crew (reviewed here) – though Samir’s crew is more land-based than Morgane’s pirate fraternity/sorority.

However, ultimately the action feels a bit episodic, rather than a coherent sequence of events. Too often Morgane doesn’t seem to ask the obvious questions, and the mystery is at times reliant on Morgane asking about food and culture rather than people or events, and when she does think of interrogating other characters, she has left it too late to seek answers from those that might have been able to shed some light on what is going on around her. Possibly this is to avoid until the end making the big reveal about the nature of the bad guys, but there is a bit of a giveaway about that in the subtitle on the book’s cover!

There is ultimately a bit of a Young Adult feel to this story which gets its strength more from Morgane’s hectic sequence of action fuelled adventures than from the satisfaction of an intricately choreographed plot.

The Vengeance is due for release 8th May, you can pre-order your copy HERE