Here's another Arizona book by an Arizona author that I picked up long ago, this one apparently at Phoenix Comicon in 2012, but this time the reason I haven't reviewed isn't that I haven't read it but that I read it before I started reviewing for the Nameless Zine in 2014. I liked it back then and I still like it now, even with two things I need to note before I start.

One is the title. 'Blackstrap's Ecstasy' might sound like it fits somewhere on a line between risque romance and BDSM smut, but the cover art is a much better guide. This is a pirate adventure, given that Blackstrap comes from rum made from blackstrap molasses, the favourite adult beverage of the lead character, who takes her pirate monicker from it, Blackstrap Gennie. Ecstasy may well be her state of mind at individual points, including one on the very first page, but, in this context, it's the name of her ship, the Ecstasy.

The other is the presentation. The cover's really nice but my second edition is presented without any justification and without any use of smartquotes. I know AZ Publishing Services and it's run by good people who tend to do a much better job than this. Why this one turned out this way, I don't know but it's easily the worst thing about the book. Bizarrely, accented characters are handled as they should be, in the French language of Solange de LeRenard, meaning that the easy stuff was wrong but the harder stuff was right.

Fortunately, the writing is much better and Czep teases us neatly with her first couple of chapters. The first features Blackstrap Gennie, the diminutive captain of the Ecstasy. She's a pirate who's on her way into Topolis to acquire the final piece she needs to complete the crew she's been building carefully for five years. The second features Solange de LeRenard, daughter of a rich Frenchman but now orphaned, who's now working learning the art of navigation on board the Lenore. Sharp-eyed readers will realise that these two characters are one and the same, having connected a few dots, like the fact that they're both only five feet tall and the first mate in both chapters goes by Marrick.

As long as we catch that, this flows nicely from the outset. If we don't, then it flows nicely from the point at which we realise it, whenever that might happen to be, a further clue being the way that the chapters alternate between the two characters, one in the present and one in the past. Over a hundred and seventy pages, they gradually merge, because this book plays out fundamentally like an origin story. The chapters in the past introduce us to a variety of characters who have important parts to play in the transition of Solange de LeRenard into Blackstrap Gennie. Their paths diverge over time but the chapters in the present involve her collecting these characters to join her crew.

Of course, there are all sorts of adventures along the way, which build up to a grand adventure in Topolis, because collecting that final crew member is not going to be remotely as easy as the rest. Powerful people are waiting for her and their plans don't remotely gel with hers. We can't believe that she's going to get this far on her quest without achieving her goal, so this approach robs the novel of a little suspense but the swashbuckling action easily makes up for that, as does the neat alternation between past and present, because, while the past chapters are new to us, they serve as flashbacks for Blackstrap Gennie, as if recapping previous books that Czep never wrote.

I've never joined any of the pirate or pirate adjacent groups that J. J. M. Czep belongs to, but I've encountered them countless times and many of them have done wonderful work at conventions I run, work or merely attend. However, I've always had a fondness for pirate stories, even if that's a cinematic thing for me, spawned from black and white movies like 'Captain Blood' and 'The Black Pirate', Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. bringing to life what I'd read in Rafael Sabatini and Robert E. Howard. By sheer coincidence, we're currently watching the TV show 'Black Sails', even though the better half picked it after I'd returned to this novel.

Czep's biggest success here, I think, is how she gave women power in a believable way. There were female pirates, including the most successful of them all, Zheng Yi Sao, a Chinese lady who owned the South China Sea during the first decade of the nineteenth century, leading a massive navy of four hundred junks and maybe fifty thousand pirates. However, most of the pirates we know from western culture are men.

I appreciated how Blackstrap Jennie was not only believable as a pirate but also as a pirate leader, even though she's twenty inches shorter than her first mate. He's male, of course, as are many of the Ecstasy's crew, but others are female and they never lose that even onboard ship, doing what pirates do. Not one of them is an obviously male character merely switched to female to trawl in a larger audience. They're all believable women who simply happen to kick ass along with their male counterparts in their own particular ways.

In fact, many of my favourite characters were women, not only Solange/Jennie, who's a good lead worthy of following through this series of adventures, but also Maggie Pye and especially Redd. Easily my favourite chapters are the ones starring Solange as the drunken Mad Blade of the Isles, battling an indignant innkeeper's son over a woman. We get two versions of that story, one from the former, whose recollection of the event has distorted greatly over a dozen years, and one in a past chapter, where we see the hilarious reality of what went down.

Another success is the diversity, not only in characters but in locations. Solange is French, though her use of that language is tempered down by the time she becomes Blackstrap Jennie. However, her crew hail from all over the world. In fact, the Ecstasy is a junk and, before Solange captured it through a memorable use of strategy, it was called Mei Hei Feng. I can't say where Topolis is, but I know it's as middle-eastern as you might expect if I point out that the finalé exists because M'nef Sheilk wants AdeebA Kossawa.

There are little negatives here and there, not unsurprisingly for a debut novel by a local author, but none of them really amount to anything and none of them affected my enjoyment. The only negative I'll call out, beyond the publisher's contribution, is that this volume, copyrighted 2008, wraps with the words "the end of book one" and proceeds to tease us with four pages from book two, 'Max's Despair'. I'd dive into that one next month, if only Czep had published it somewhere, but, to the best of my knowledge, there is no second volume. Now, it serves well as a standalone volume, so a sequel is needed, but it does feel like the beginning to a series, which this backs up.

She has written other books and short stories and I believe she's very active in the world of Kindle Vella nowadays, but none of that, to the best of my knowledge, returns her to this series. I'll have to ask her next time I see her what might have happened to Blackstrap Jennie and if we'll ever get to hear from her again. I'm sure she's out there somewhere, wreaking glorious havoc in a remote spot on the globe that would serve well as another novel or even a set of short stories. After all, it isn't like she left pirate life behind her. She's as active in that scene right now as she was when she wrote this. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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