We Are Pirates (Handler) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A witty adult novel by Lemony Snicket author Daniel Handler.... Lemony Snicket's gothic humor lingers over this tale of upper-middle-class despair.... [A] dark and whimsical novel.... Yes, we are pirates, but we're chained on barren land. Has that theme ever been explored in such a weird mixture of impish wit and tender sympathy?
Washington Post


Exuberant.... Handler's a master with language, crafting showstopping sentences that are fresh and funny.... [He gives] everything the feel of legend, a story burnished with each retelling, and gleaming with rich moral lessons.... Although the novel is a raucously funny adventure, it's also a tragic exploration of the restlessness in all of us, of the ways we want to claim our happiness like buried treasure that might change everything. We Are Pirates is about how we try to forge our own destinies, and if we're lucky, become heroes of our own stories.
Caroline Leavitt - San Francisco Chronicle


Full of whimsy, adventure and intrigue. There are dastardly grown-ups and children in peril, moments of high camp and utter despair.... Beneath all the trappings of make-believe and fancy dress, there is a poignant, serious story about a girl's need to find her true self, shackled to her desire to escape from the world-and the irreconcilable, sometimes bloody conflict between those two yearnings.... The exhilarating sections dealing with this caper are the book's highlights, the prose full of high-blown pirate speak that does little to hide the sincerity of all those on deck.
Daily Telegraph (UK)


This, his fifth novel for adults, retains the whimsy, intrigue and high camp of his children's fiction. Silly but poignant.
Sunday Telegraph (UK)


[D]ark and light, YA yarn and midlife doldrums—while making readers root for his 20th-century privateers. The book never quite decides how serious it wants to be..., but it does offer a jaunty and occasionally jolting, and honest take on the discomforts of youth, midlife, and old age, and how ineffective we are at dealing with them.
Publishers Weekly


As the Huffington Post says, "If it's possible to be criminally underrated yet also be a millions-selling author, then Handler is it." He's world famous as Lemony Snicket, but not everyone remembers that his last adult book, Adverbs (2006), won considerable praise for being both formally experimental and emotionally arresting. Here, conscientious-to-a-fault 14-year-old Gwen follows her dreams, rounding up a motley crew and becoming a pirate who spreads terror on San Francisco Bay.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Handler (aka children’s author Lemony Snicket) has never been known for writing precisely happy novels, and his latest certainly doesn’t deviate. What could easily have been a slightly silly, fantastical romp becomes, instead, in Handler’s capable hands, a macabre, darkly human portrayal of family dynamics and growing up in a world running low on adventure...peppered with black humor.
Booklist


Handler is a master at depicting the existential chaos all his major characters are living through, and with warmth, sympathy and considerable humor at that. The reader will delight in Gwen and old Errol's escapade.... Affecting, lively and expertly told. Just the sort of thing to make grown-ups and teenagers alike want to unfurl the black flag.
Kirkus Reviews