One of my favorite storytelling tropes is the found family. I thought Mad Max: Fury Road was one of the best movies of the past decade. I still unironically enjoy pirate stories. Badass ladies are badass.
So Seafire by Natalie C. Parker is checking a lot of my boxes.
Seafire is a swashbuckling dystopia following Caledonia Styx, a young woman on the run from a powerful warlord Aric Athair. After her family is ambushed and murdered by a crew of the warlord’s Bullets — loyal soldiers groomed from childhood for violence and controlled by mandatory drug addiction — Caledonia is forced to turn from refugee to pirate captain, sailing the high seas with her all-female crew of rebels and renegades aboard the Mors Navis, taking the fight to Aric’s forces by targeting his fleet of floating garden barges where the flowers that fuel his drug production are grown.
But when one of Aric’s Bullets tries to defect to Caledonia’s side, saving the life of her best friend in the process, the captain’s survival tactics and deep-seated beliefs are called into question. On the one hand, he represents everything she and her crew despise, and keeping him aboard could mean all of their deaths; after all, trusting a Bullet was what led to her family’s deaths. On the other, if he’s telling the truth, he might hold the key to taking down Aric once and for all — and to Caledonia being reunited with the little brother that she thought she’d already lost long ago.
