Adventures In Piracy
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I might have mentioned before how much I admire authors. I don’t want to use the word “idolize” (mostly because it doesn’t reflect well on me) but that word is probably accurate. And I am fortunate enough to personally know several published authors. One such is my friend Rob Liebertz, who has written and published four books in his Sharp Tales series with possibly two more coming in the future.
I will be honest; the writing is rough. In fact, the first quarter of the first book is so rough that if I didn’t like Rob VERY MUCH, I wouldn’t have been able to push through. But once I got past that, the story kicked in and I was hooked. Rob is slowly polishing his writing skills and becoming a better writer with each book he publishes. He is also pondering a rewrite of the beginning of the first book. But one thing he’s always been good at is story. The man can spin such a good yarn that I sometimes wonder if he doesn’t have a little Irish in him. (You should hear him tell stories about his many years working as a 911 police dispatcher.). Also, his characters are excellent; interesting, fleshed-out, and consistent over his four books. They even grow and change over the stories…just like real people!
If you are a fan of C.S. Forester (the Horatio Hornblower series or the fantastic historical epic The Age of Fighting Sail) or Patrick O’Brian (the Master and Commander series), then these stories will absolutely hook you. Although I struggled to get started on the first book, I had no problem at all powering through the next three books. In fact, I read each of them in one sitting, because I just could not wait to see what happened next.
Rob’s books follow a protagonist by the name of Gerard Sharp, a young man raised with some unusual skills and some unusual world views. He ends up sailing the high seas, encountering friendly (and occasionally unfriendly) natives on beautiful islands, fighting pirates, and generally learning his craft as he goes. This brief description hardly does justice to the stories in the books but I don’t wish to spoil anything for any future reader. There are some anachronisms in word choice in the books and a somewhat modern mental approach to life; but these don’t get in the way of the story and so I didn’t find them particularly troublesome.
Perhaps these books aren’t for everyone, but as someone who owns every book C.S. Forester ever published, I can recommend them. In addition to getting them off Amazon, you can also order them off Rob’s website, SevenMinutesOfPiracy.com. Rob and his delightful wife also run a YouTube channel of the same name. Why not give the books a try? Let yourself get swept up in the saga of Gerard the Sharp.
