HUDSON'S PIRATEY ADVENTURE

In Bell’s middle-grade novel, a teenage boy travels to a land of pirates and saves his family from an ancient curse.

Hudson Boone is off to spend the summer with his grandmother. He knows she can be a bit odd, especially since his grandfather’s recent disappearance. But upon arriving at her house, he is shocked to discover that it now carries a nautical theme, complete with a moat surrounding the building. Things become weirder when Hudson goes inside and encounters a collection of glass cats, rooms he is forbidden to enter, and mysterious voices that seem to come from nowhere. Weirder still, a whirlwind snatches Hudson from the house and deposits him in the past, by a pirate ship. Hudson is taken under the wing of Net, one of the youngest crew members, and joins the voyage, which is more about commerce than plundering (“pirates are the truck drivers of the oceans,” Net explains). The biggest threat turns out to be mermaids—they see the pirates as their mortal enemies, and the mermaid leader, Marilla, has a particular vendetta against the Boone family. Hudson learns that the mermaids have been targeting his family for generations (the ship’s captain is an ancestor). With help from the pirate crew and Meri, a young mermaid, Hudson prepares for battle with Marilla. Bell is a vivid writer (“With any luck, this world might just be a dream--like a mashup of the Renaissance Festival, Grandma’s boathouse, and that kid in first grade who always ate the mushy grapes and their stems”), and her world-building makes the book’s more preposterous situations palatable, keeping the reader’s attention on the drama rather than the less fully developed plot. The action scenes are well done, although Marilla is not a particularly compelling antagonist.

An action story likely to appeal to readers on the younger side of middle-grade.