A Whale of a Tale

This gamegirl has wreaked havoc on the high seas—but the tide is about to turn…

In the Internet Virtual Reality game of “Buckling Swashes,” Earless Erika and Black Corbin are two of the most deadly pirates to sail the online seas. And now they’ve met their matches: each other.

But fearless Earless Erika is really just Amy—a financial analyst with little time in her life for anything but work. And Corbin is none other than the man behind the game—owner and CEO of the parent company. He’s intrigued by Amy, the only buccaneer to best him in this test of digital testosterone, while she just wants to take his arrogance down a peg. But soon the two find themselves comrades at arms against a merciless rival bent on Corbin’s destruction—both on the virtual high seas and in real life. Only by setting aside their differences can they locate the actual people behind the swaggering swashbucklers—and along the way, find that love can tame even the most fearsome of pirates.

Shiver me timbers…

Title: Blow Me Down
Author: Katie MacAlister
Published: 2005
Publisher: Signet Eclipse (Penguin Group)
Pages: 359
Genre: Romance-Contemporary, Historical, Science-Fiction

I had never read a Katie MacAlister novel before I picked Blow Me Down up so I was more than a little wary, especially when I realized it was set almost entirely inside an online video game (something I can’t say I’m very fond of) but I absolutely adored it! The plot of the book was very strange and yet it was also almost believable.

I loved how the characters were original, relatable, funny, and almost real. I especially liked Amy because she could be a tough pirate one moment but still be able to ask for help when she needed it. Amy’s “pirate with a shining rapier” Corbin wasn’t too bad either, although not someone I would usually like because to be quiet honest, he was a geek. A cute piratey geek not afraid of expressing his feelings, but a geek nonetheless. Besides those two, the other most interesting characters in the game... I mean book, would be Bas and his bird Bran. Well, Bas was just a weird little kid (with a hook for one of his hands!) obsessed with death that no one liked until Amy decided to pretty much adopted him but I really liked his bird.

I think the reason why I was able to enjoy the book so much was because it was set in present day (with James Bond references and everything) but at the same time it was authentically set in the piratey times too. I’d love to be able to travel to other time periods just by putting on a pair of glasses and sitting in front of a computer but I most definitely wouldn’t want to get stuck there like Amy and the others did!

If you would like more information on the author and her books, Wikipedia has an article. As MacAlister says in her behind-the-scenes podcast (and at the end of the novel itself), she was inspired to write Blow Me Down after playing the real multiplayer online role-playing game called Puzzle Pirates. Yarr!

First Sentence: "You know what your problem is?"

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