Avon, $5.99, ISBN 0-06-050282-7
Historical Romance, 2003
The Princess and the Pirate is, in one word, insipid. I am supposed to believe that Princess Tatiana Oblok Koblock Dummy Nitwitia Moronica de Dumdum of Sodummia, okay, Sedona, instead of sending a messenger to summon Pirate Lord Cairn MacTavish to her palace, goes incognito as a working class girl to his pirate hideout. Unarmed, alone except for an unpleasant male companion. Where upon landing from the boat, she gets robbed of her money (don’t these idiot women always?) and when she gives chase, is mistaken as a thief herself and is thrown into the dungeon. Upon which I am screaming, “Kill her! Kill her! Off with her head!” and it’s not even page 150 yet. Oh boy.
Our hero finds this thief “Meg” so hot and so he keeps her in his room and tries to seduce her. She resists, but oh, he is so virile and our haughty princess has never been manhandled this delightfully before! How can she resist? And of course, she can’t tell him who she is. Why? I don’t know. Then again, the moment Tankbrainnia here appears in the story, acting as if she, as a baby, has been dropped down ten flights of staircases, I’ll be more shocked if she acts with a semblance of brainpower for once. As for Egghead MacTavish, if this is the man I am supposed to hire to protect my kingdom, I’d may as well open the kingdom gates wide and invite the plunder and rape spree, because Egghead is that competent, being led around by his egghead junior as it is. Tankbrainnia, of course, just has to marry Egghead to save her kingdom, and that’s why we don’t have a kingdom called Sodummia today. Even the mentally handicapped Prussian emperors will have no problem carving up the kingdom when it’s run by the morons incorporated of Tankbrainnia and Egghead.
It’s probably too much to ask for a princess to act like a royalty instead of a scatterbrained haughty teenager or a ruthless pirate lord to act, well, like a ruthless pirate lord. This incompetent story of marathon-ic contrivances, bad miscommunication, and cluelessness has everything going for it except for readability and logic.
