about the book
Hilary Westfield wants to be a pirate. Too bad she is a girl! The “Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates” does not allow girls to join their crew…
Well, they are all scourges and scallywags anyway. Hilary decides to find her own adventure—not easy to do when her father is a navy admiral! He sends her to a finishing school, where she learns how to do embroidery, practice good etiquette, and even how to faint like a lady. Yuck! Hilary wants to be a pirate; pirates don’t do any of these things.
A talking gargoyle helps Hilary run away from her school to join Jasper Fletcher and his “freelance” pirate gang. They obviously take women, since Hilary’s former governess is there. The gargoyle becomes the pirate ship’s figure head; who needs mermaids?
With her new friends, Hilary studies a map with no X on it to find a treasure that probably doesn’t exist, and getting into many adventures on the high seas.
about the author
Always a reader, but not always a writer, Caroline Carlson grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts, reading good books of mystery, magic, and humor, including those by Lois Lowry and Susan Cooper.
At the age of nine Caroline (what a rhyme!) won a poetry contest hosted by Cricket magazine; the prize was that her poem—about Sam the rat—was published in the magazine.
It was a long time before she had anything published again. There was high school and college in-between. She was an English major in college—lots of reading and writing there— but she also took psychology courses so she could learn how people think and why they act the way they do. After college she worked for some time as a textbook editor, got a master’s degree in writing for children, and learned more about storytelling from writers like Sharon Darrow and Martine Leavitt.
During the last semester of school, she wrote the draft of her first novel, Magic Marks the Spot. She sent it in, and when her agent called to tell her it had been sold, Caroline was dressed like a penguin—there’s a picture to prove it! Now she and her husband live in Pennsylvania, where she is still the happiest when she is reading a good book.
Source:
Author website
Also by Caroline Carlson:
The Terror of the Southlands (Very Nearly Honorable League of Pirates, Book 2). Harper Collins. 2014.
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