The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle

In my mind, this book shows one of the great character arcs in literature. The persnickety thirteen-year-old Charlotte begins her 1832 voyage from London to America admiring iron-fisted Captain Jaggery of the Seahawk. When she overhears the crew speaking of mutiny, she snitches on them.

At one point, I was hoping she’d get swept overboard. But Charlotte bonds with the ship’s black cook, Zachariah, and begins to see life beyond her vantage of a rich white child of privilege. As conditions worsen on the Seahawk, Charlotte sides with the crew, becomes a deckhand, and eventually their captain!

This is an… show more.

I absolutely marveled at the strength Charlotte showed in this excellent, rollicking high-seas adventure.

It was terrible, it was life or death for her every day. And she found her way through it. The beautiful survivor strength of the main character is what inspired me. 

The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle sparked my interest in seafaring tales. As a young reader, I was drawn in by the deeply personal narration of teenage Charlotte as well as the themes of class and gender. Before this book, I didn’t know that girls could be swashbucklers themselves. It was the gateway that my imagination needed to begin writing my own stories.

This book speaks to something we all had inside us when we were kids: a fervent hope that we’d all have an adventure like the one Charlotte Doyle has. As adults, we realize we wouldn’t last a day in the sort of life Charlotte falls into in this story, but if ever there was a Young Adult novel that should be famous and adapted into a movie, this is the one. Not a romance per se, unless 13-year-old Charlotte’s romance with action, adventure, and escaping to sea count, but certainly a book to fall in love with. Set in 1832,… show more.