The Pirate Queen by Ariel Lawhon is a story of a brave, fierce, sharp-minded woman, Grace O’Malley, who believes she belongs to the sea, a feeling that goes all the way back to the storm she was born in. Her world disagrees. Women on the water, and women who own ships, are said to bring bad luck, and Grace is determined to prove everyone wrong. Then there’s the English Crown, which keeps tightening its grip on her homeland and her people. She has to face that too.

“Because everything fun is out there. I don’t want to stay. I want to go.”

Grace O’Malley, The Pirate Queen by Ariel Lawhon

The way Ariel Lawhon starts the story intrigued me right away. Chapters jump back and forth in time, and each one is headed with a stage of Grace’s life plus the year and her age. Page by page, you see how the good times, the heartbreaks, the betrayals, and the sacrifices made her the Pirate Queen of Ireland.

I have to admit that the size of the book scared me a little. It’s thick, and, to make it even more intimidating, it opens with a cast list and a note that some names will appear before the people themselves do. I set my worries aside and read it anyway, and they soon vanished. Lawhon writes so clearly that I could usually guess who a mentioned character was from how the story described them. I’d flip back to the cast pages just to check, and I was right more often than I expected. It’s a testament to Lawhon’s skill that she makes a complex cast and plot easy to follow through the storytelling alone.

That ease carries through the whole book. There are political intricacies, betrayals, and shifting alliances that can mess with your head. Even so, every character feels fully human, and the atmosphere of the era is so vivid that I never felt buried by the complexity. Lawhon handles a big, tangled story with a lot of people in it and still makes it a joy to read that my feelings grew in stages over the course of the reading journey, a bit like Grace’s life. First I fell for Grace and her fierce spirit. Then I fell for the plot. By the end, I loved the whole crowd, because each character had their own personality.

You’ll find family, love, loss, danger, and power struggles in 1500s Ireland, with its beautiful coasts and tough politics. If you like historical fiction with a strong heroine and lots of heart, give this one a try, even if it’s thick.

My Favorite Bits

• “Men. Lie. Sometimes with words. Sometimes without them.”
  “Do women lie?”
  “Tá.”
  “When?”
  “Usually when our lives depend on it.”

• “Then how will they respect me?”
  “They won’t,” Maeve says with a shrug. Then she takes her daughter’s face in her hands and brings it close. Until their noses touch and their breath mingles. “Not unless you make them.”

• Time is a lie and Eóin knows it is quickly running out.

• But she is learning to let others think of her what they will. She is learning to keep secrets. And in the dark soil of her silence, she is gathering bits of knowledge like seed, planting them deep.

---

Author: Ariel Lawhon
Publication date: 8 September 2026
Number of pages: 528 pages

---