When her parents decide she should attend a boarding school, Terry decides it's time to spread her wings and stows away on the yacht of a local wealthy guy she knows is set to go on a long journey. Except when she wakes up, she finds his son Mick stole the yacht in an attempt to make his father actually notice his existence. When that fails, they decide to keep sailing south, the ship survives a tropical storm, and Terry finds herself alone on-board when pirates show up.
A very motley bunch of pirates, to be sure, but still pirates. The last two-thirds of the book are Terry, first alone and later with Mick, trying to devise away to escape before she gets murdered. Once Mick is around, Terry's also trying to navigate and understand exactly what she's starting to feel about him. Thompson tries to capture that mindset of being in one's late teens, when you know more than you did when you were younger, and as a result feel more mature and sure of yourself, but there's still a lot you miss. Terry's big plan was to make it to a Caribbean island, then work at a Banana Republic store. Possibly she would find a mute boy washed up on-shore and they could become. . .something.
You can see the gaps in this plan. Likewise, Terry knows enough to put thought into what she should wear around the pirates, in terms of how they perceive her - someone well-to-do, someone wretched and desperate - but doesn't quite grasp what the Dragon Lady is inferring when Terry refers to the wealthy guy as "Daddy".
There are a few elements of the absurd, beyond a pirate crew of 5 living on an otherwise uninhabited island. The Dragon Lady's pet is a full-grown Komodo dragon named Bubba. There's a buried treasure the pirates are searching for on the island, and most curiously, Mick had another personality, a marquis from fifteenth century France who was friends with Joan of Arc. The two are on good terms, as there are conversations that are basically three people, Terry, Mick, and the marquis, the latter two switching control back and forth.
There's no explanation given, beyond Mick claiming the marquis is a past life. Although this is one brief utterance by Mick that makes me think the whole thing is an act he puts on, where he comments, basically, "horny boys will say anything." But I don't know if that's what the marquis is, something Mick devised to impress Terry, who he'd never met. And it wouldn't explain how he makes his stutter go away entirely when he's the marquis.
The book moves very quickly. There are only a couple of times Thompson slows down to let something sink in. Usually when Terry feels most alone, and so presumably when she most wants reassurance or some sort of escape. Otherwise, the plot rolls along and there's a near constant-string of new developments and adjustments to her and Mick's plans as new things come to light. It's a light, pleasant read.
'The awkwardness she'd seen when he was trying to get his pants on was replaced by an almost monkeylike agility as he danced from here to there, up onto the foredeck and back again. Terry wondered, fleetingly, if she was looking at the downside of human evolution; that men were graceful only with their clothes on nowadays.'
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