Book Review: Steel

TITLE: Steel
AUTHOR: Carrie Vaughn
PUBLISHED: 2011
CATEGORY: Young adult
GENRE: historical fiction, time travel, drama
PREMISE: Jill is a fencing obsessed teen who is sent back in time where she has to work on a ship with real pirates.
MY REVIEW: I wanted to love this one so much and to be clear it has lots of good things going for it. Jill is a decent character, the descriptions and research into real pirates was very well done, lots of action, and it gets an automatic cool factor because it's about pirates.
Unfortunately some stuff keeps it from being so awesome. It drags a lot in the middle. No logical explanation is given for how Jill ended up in the past. I felt the ending was abrupt and sudden. I also never really saw a POINT for it all. Really, what was the point? To get her to stop obsessing over failure? Enjoy herself? WHAT?
So while I loved the idea of this book, the execution of it...not so much. Which is a shame because it starts off really good. Rec it for a library read, that's about it.
WHO SHOULD READ: pirate fans, historical fiction fans
MY RATING: Three and a half out of Five rapiers