Pirate by Fabio
Publisher: Avon, 1993
Genre: Romance
Sub-genre: Historical
Rating: 2 pints of blood
This book was awful. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Yes, it was one of those books. By all rights, this should have gotten a much lower rating, but it was so unintentionally hilarious, I could not stop laughing.
As for the cover itself... do I even have to tell you how much this makes me laugh? I mean, who wears leather breeches on a pirate ship? And isn't it kind of dangerous to wear a loose knife tucked into his belt like that? Also, I wasn't aware it was common for pirates in the 1700s to wax their chests like that. I guess you learn something new every day.
I found this book in the midst of a huge used book sale, and it was worth the full 50 cents just to be able to tell people I had a novel that was written by Fabio. At that point, people are already cracking up, and they don't know the levels of ridiculous contained within the pages. Personally, I'm rather fond of the inset included:
I'm so touched. Clearly, Fabio intended this book for me. I wonder if he also intended me to laugh so hard I cried.
The plot is a muddle, so you'll have to bear with me. If it makes no sense, well, I take none of the blame for that. Marco (I have to admit, I was mildly disappointed his name wasn't actually Fabio) is a burly, pacifistic pirate. No, seriously, I'm not kidding. He hates violence, and in the opening action scene, he has a swordfight with one of the EVIL Spanish pirates, which ends when Marco smacks his opponent in the head with the flat of his sword, knocking the other pirate out instead of killing him. Clearly, this guy has made a wise occupational decision. While Marco the blonde Italian (I guess if they wax their chests, they could also bleach their hair) is trying to save the peaceful village from the raiding and pillaging of the Evil Spanish pirates, led by the Supremely Evil Carlos, Marco comes across a twelve-year-old girl caught in the middle of the fray. She's the most beautiful child he's ever seen, and instead of finding her a safe place to hide, he decides to take her with him on his ship. The girl's nurse protests, so he takes her, too. Because it's obviously not kidnapping if you take the woman who's supposed to care for the child along for the ride.
We get a couple chapters of Marco bonding with the child, Christina, as he takes her to his island hideout. There, he and his crew spoil Christina rotten, much to the chagrin of the nurse, who wanted to teach the girl obviously unimportant things like reading, math, and manners. Christina has a huge crush on Marco, which he thinks is charming, although his whores are considerably less amused.
Six years later, Christina is eighteen, and as ridiculously beautiful as you'd expect of a romance heroine. Now that she's an adult, she's determined to have Marco for herself, although he's less than co-operative about the idea. Christina pulls a series of childish pranks to ensure none of the island's whores will have anything to do with Marco, and because he's such a manly man with such manly needs, this creates a huge problem for him. He has urges and no way to relieve them! So he decides the best thing to do is to get the girl married off to someone respectable. Following a thoroughly convenient sequence of events, Marco runs into an old friend and manages to arrange a marriage between Christina and his friend's son. He thinks it's a great idea to tell his friend he runs a sugar plantation and then invite the whole family to come visit the pirate island. After which Marco is astonished at how difficult it is to make his pirate crew behave like respectable sugar folk. Frankly, I'm astonished they didn't just tell him to shove his orders and go on merrily doing whatever they liked. Marco may be the ship's captain, but he doesn't have any power over them on land.
Christina is outraged when she hears about the arranged marriage, since she's determined she'll only marry Marco in spite of the numerous times he's told her it's never going to happen. He tells her he refuses to marry her for her own good, and then proceeds to make out with her. Repeatedly. Christina's fiancé and family come to the island, and Christina decides to flirt shamelessly with her fiancé to make Marco jealous. It works. He makes out with her and hopes nobody will notice, especially since he's told everyone he's her uncle.
Word about Marco's niece Christina spreads, and soon her legal guardian and the man in charge of her trust account hear word. They come down to the island and generally spread confusion, but Marco manages to convince his friend to keep the engagement by upping Christina's dowry. Then, as would be anyone's normal reaction under the circumstances, he decides to make out with Christina some more. Random assassins start showing up on the island, and Marco tries to hide them from his guests, assuming they were sent by the Supremely Evil Carlos. Predictably, the assassins can't be kept secret for very long, and everyone is shocked to hear that Marco has nothing to do with suger; he is, in fact, a pirate!
The Supremely Evil Carlos uses some of Marco's recently spurned and bitter whores to find out the whereabouts of his secret island, and shows up to kidnap Christina. Marco runs heroically to the rescue, to find Christina poised to castrate the Supremely Evil pirate. He laughs and takes her home.
Only it turns out Supremely Evil Carlos is not acting on his own Supremely Evil plan... Christina's guardian gets all the money in the event of her death, or if she's missing for seven years, and he's now desperate to get her out of the picture. He kidnaps her, and Marco teams up with the Suddenly Less Evil Carlos to get her back. Christina forgives the Suddenly Less Evil Carlos for his earlier kidnapping when she hears he's marrying Marco's former mistress, who's having a Suddenly Less Evil baby. They all laugh like good buddies, despite having hated each other one chapter earlier. Oh, and Marco decides that maybe he wouldn't be the worst husband in the world after all.
I seriously don't think I'm doing justice to just how many "wait... what just happened? Are you kidding? But that makes no sense!" moments there were in this book. The prose was so purple I was amazed the pages hadn't been stained that colour, there was some excessive abuse of exclamation points going on, and the dialogue was wooden and awkward. Christina was annoying and immature, her eighteen-year-old incarnation apparently not having grown emotionally from the twelve-year-old version we meet at the beginning of the book. Marco whined and suffered from severe mood swings, and did I mention he's not only a pacifistic pirate but a blonde Italian?
The book more or less ends with a James Bond-esque villain speech, followed by a last minute heroic escape from death involving much swashbuckling. Literary-wise, I don't think this book had any redeeming features. It was horrible. And it lived up to all the hopes and expectations I held for it.
Alright, hilarious quotes and a few other things that particularly made me laugh:
-Marco believes that girls of 14, 15, or 16 are too young to be getting married. In the 1700s. He believes this so firmly, it requires an exclamation point!
-"Oh please do it," she begged, her impatient fingers popping buttons on his shirt. "I do so hunger to feel your large hands on my backside." What was that I was saying about purple prose and awkward dialogue before? I can't quite recall...
-(about young Christina) "He knew then that they were friends now, and she was a part of his life, whether he wanted it that way or not." Just a thought... if you don't want it that way, maybe leave the girl with her nurse and her village.
-"...if Rutgers should learn the truth regarding Christina's disappearance and Marco's role in it, he feared that the magistrate would almost certainly misunderstand his motives in rescuing her and might well have him arrested for kidnapping instead." Could this be because... you kidnapped her? I mean, come on. Let's call a spade a spade.
-"...he realized that if he did so, he would not stop until she was pinned beneath him on the sand, her maidenhead breached by his driving heat." Few things crack me up faster than a terrible euphemism.
-"He quickly shucked off his breeches, then his hair-roughened thighs spread hers wide..." Yeah, nothing says sexy like hairy legs. Guess he ran out of wax after he did his chest.
-"What do you mean by that?" she cried, exasperated.
"If you do not know, then I cannot make you understand," he said stubbornly.
Dude! Marco's a chick! And clearly caught at that special time of month, at that. Which... actually, might explain a lot...
Genre: Romance
Sub-genre: Historical
Rating: 2 pints of blood
This book was awful. I enjoyed every minute of it.
Yes, it was one of those books. By all rights, this should have gotten a much lower rating, but it was so unintentionally hilarious, I could not stop laughing.
As for the cover itself... do I even have to tell you how much this makes me laugh? I mean, who wears leather breeches on a pirate ship? And isn't it kind of dangerous to wear a loose knife tucked into his belt like that? Also, I wasn't aware it was common for pirates in the 1700s to wax their chests like that. I guess you learn something new every day.
I found this book in the midst of a huge used book sale, and it was worth the full 50 cents just to be able to tell people I had a novel that was written by Fabio. At that point, people are already cracking up, and they don't know the levels of ridiculous contained within the pages. Personally, I'm rather fond of the inset included:
I'm so touched. Clearly, Fabio intended this book for me. I wonder if he also intended me to laugh so hard I cried.
The plot is a muddle, so you'll have to bear with me. If it makes no sense, well, I take none of the blame for that. Marco (I have to admit, I was mildly disappointed his name wasn't actually Fabio) is a burly, pacifistic pirate. No, seriously, I'm not kidding. He hates violence, and in the opening action scene, he has a swordfight with one of the EVIL Spanish pirates, which ends when Marco smacks his opponent in the head with the flat of his sword, knocking the other pirate out instead of killing him. Clearly, this guy has made a wise occupational decision. While Marco the blonde Italian (I guess if they wax their chests, they could also bleach their hair) is trying to save the peaceful village from the raiding and pillaging of the Evil Spanish pirates, led by the Supremely Evil Carlos, Marco comes across a twelve-year-old girl caught in the middle of the fray. She's the most beautiful child he's ever seen, and instead of finding her a safe place to hide, he decides to take her with him on his ship. The girl's nurse protests, so he takes her, too. Because it's obviously not kidnapping if you take the woman who's supposed to care for the child along for the ride.
We get a couple chapters of Marco bonding with the child, Christina, as he takes her to his island hideout. There, he and his crew spoil Christina rotten, much to the chagrin of the nurse, who wanted to teach the girl obviously unimportant things like reading, math, and manners. Christina has a huge crush on Marco, which he thinks is charming, although his whores are considerably less amused.
Six years later, Christina is eighteen, and as ridiculously beautiful as you'd expect of a romance heroine. Now that she's an adult, she's determined to have Marco for herself, although he's less than co-operative about the idea. Christina pulls a series of childish pranks to ensure none of the island's whores will have anything to do with Marco, and because he's such a manly man with such manly needs, this creates a huge problem for him. He has urges and no way to relieve them! So he decides the best thing to do is to get the girl married off to someone respectable. Following a thoroughly convenient sequence of events, Marco runs into an old friend and manages to arrange a marriage between Christina and his friend's son. He thinks it's a great idea to tell his friend he runs a sugar plantation and then invite the whole family to come visit the pirate island. After which Marco is astonished at how difficult it is to make his pirate crew behave like respectable sugar folk. Frankly, I'm astonished they didn't just tell him to shove his orders and go on merrily doing whatever they liked. Marco may be the ship's captain, but he doesn't have any power over them on land.
Christina is outraged when she hears about the arranged marriage, since she's determined she'll only marry Marco in spite of the numerous times he's told her it's never going to happen. He tells her he refuses to marry her for her own good, and then proceeds to make out with her. Repeatedly. Christina's fiancé and family come to the island, and Christina decides to flirt shamelessly with her fiancé to make Marco jealous. It works. He makes out with her and hopes nobody will notice, especially since he's told everyone he's her uncle.
Word about Marco's niece Christina spreads, and soon her legal guardian and the man in charge of her trust account hear word. They come down to the island and generally spread confusion, but Marco manages to convince his friend to keep the engagement by upping Christina's dowry. Then, as would be anyone's normal reaction under the circumstances, he decides to make out with Christina some more. Random assassins start showing up on the island, and Marco tries to hide them from his guests, assuming they were sent by the Supremely Evil Carlos. Predictably, the assassins can't be kept secret for very long, and everyone is shocked to hear that Marco has nothing to do with suger; he is, in fact, a pirate!
The Supremely Evil Carlos uses some of Marco's recently spurned and bitter whores to find out the whereabouts of his secret island, and shows up to kidnap Christina. Marco runs heroically to the rescue, to find Christina poised to castrate the Supremely Evil pirate. He laughs and takes her home.
Only it turns out Supremely Evil Carlos is not acting on his own Supremely Evil plan... Christina's guardian gets all the money in the event of her death, or if she's missing for seven years, and he's now desperate to get her out of the picture. He kidnaps her, and Marco teams up with the Suddenly Less Evil Carlos to get her back. Christina forgives the Suddenly Less Evil Carlos for his earlier kidnapping when she hears he's marrying Marco's former mistress, who's having a Suddenly Less Evil baby. They all laugh like good buddies, despite having hated each other one chapter earlier. Oh, and Marco decides that maybe he wouldn't be the worst husband in the world after all.
I seriously don't think I'm doing justice to just how many "wait... what just happened? Are you kidding? But that makes no sense!" moments there were in this book. The prose was so purple I was amazed the pages hadn't been stained that colour, there was some excessive abuse of exclamation points going on, and the dialogue was wooden and awkward. Christina was annoying and immature, her eighteen-year-old incarnation apparently not having grown emotionally from the twelve-year-old version we meet at the beginning of the book. Marco whined and suffered from severe mood swings, and did I mention he's not only a pacifistic pirate but a blonde Italian?
The book more or less ends with a James Bond-esque villain speech, followed by a last minute heroic escape from death involving much swashbuckling. Literary-wise, I don't think this book had any redeeming features. It was horrible. And it lived up to all the hopes and expectations I held for it.
Alright, hilarious quotes and a few other things that particularly made me laugh:
-Marco believes that girls of 14, 15, or 16 are too young to be getting married. In the 1700s. He believes this so firmly, it requires an exclamation point!
-"Oh please do it," she begged, her impatient fingers popping buttons on his shirt. "I do so hunger to feel your large hands on my backside." What was that I was saying about purple prose and awkward dialogue before? I can't quite recall...
-(about young Christina) "He knew then that they were friends now, and she was a part of his life, whether he wanted it that way or not." Just a thought... if you don't want it that way, maybe leave the girl with her nurse and her village.
-"...if Rutgers should learn the truth regarding Christina's disappearance and Marco's role in it, he feared that the magistrate would almost certainly misunderstand his motives in rescuing her and might well have him arrested for kidnapping instead." Could this be because... you kidnapped her? I mean, come on. Let's call a spade a spade.
-"...he realized that if he did so, he would not stop until she was pinned beneath him on the sand, her maidenhead breached by his driving heat." Few things crack me up faster than a terrible euphemism.
-"He quickly shucked off his breeches, then his hair-roughened thighs spread hers wide..." Yeah, nothing says sexy like hairy legs. Guess he ran out of wax after he did his chest.
-"What do you mean by that?" she cried, exasperated.
"If you do not know, then I cannot make you understand," he said stubbornly.
Dude! Marco's a chick! And clearly caught at that special time of month, at that. Which... actually, might explain a lot...