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Title | Demons of the Ocean
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Author | Justin Somper
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Cover Art | Jon Foster
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Publisher | Little, Brown and Company - 2006
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First Printing | Simon & Shuster UK - 2005
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Title | Dead Deep
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Author | Justin Somper
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | ---
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First Printing | ---
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Title | Tide of Terror
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Author | Justin Somper
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Cover Art | Jon Foster
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Publisher | Little, Brown and Company - 2008
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First Printing | Simon & Shuster UK - 2006
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Title | Blood Captain
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Author | Justin Somper
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Cover Art | Jon Foster
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Publisher | Little, Brown and Company - 2008
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First Printing | Simon & Shuster UK - 2007
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Title | Black Heart
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Author | Justin Somper
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Cover Art | ---
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Publisher | Little, Brown and Company - 2009
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First Printing | Simon & Shuster UK - 2008
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Title | Empire of Night
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Author | Justin Somper
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Cover Art | Justin Gerard
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Publisher | Little, Brown and Company - 2010
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First Printing | Simon & Shuster UK - 2010
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Title | Immortal War
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Author | Justin Somper
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Cover Art | Justin Gerard
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Publisher | Little, Brown and Company - 2012
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First Printing | Simon & Shuster UK - 2011
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Category | Young Adult
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Warnings | None
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Main Characters | Grace, Connor, Sidorio, Lorcan, Cheng Li
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Main Elements | Vampires, pirates
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Website | Vampirates.co.uk
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 Demons of the Ocean
Twins Connor and Grace never dreamed that there was any truth to the Vampirates shanty their father sang to them before he died, but that was before the two were shipwrecked and separated from each other. For Connor, who is taken aboard a pirate ship, there's the chance to learn to sword fight, but for Grace, aboard a mysterious ship of vampires, the danger is great.
The lure of the pirate life at sea may be just tempting enough to make Connor forget his past, but without him, Grace will not be able to survive.
If you're ready for an adventure that will take you into the future, aboard a pirate ship and a ship of vampires, join Connor and Grace in an unforgettable race against time and the elements.
Tide of Terror
Plenty and Satiety,
Pleasure and Ease,
Liberty and Power
These words at the entrance gate to the elite Pirate Academy can hardly prepare Connor and Grace for what they'll find inside: class in combat, navigation, and EMS - Extreme Maritime Survival. The Academy could give Connor the excitement of piracy without any of the danger, but there are secrets inside the school's ancient walls. And as Grace - who has an awful lot of secrets of her own - knows, nothing is ever quite what it seems in the world of pirates and vampires.
Blood Captain
These are trying times aboard the infamous pirate ship, The Diablo, especially after Captain Wrathe's evil nephew, Moonshine, joins the crew. As Connor faces the ultimate test in combat, he questions his ties to the captain and the pirate world.
Meanwhile, his sister Grace, journeys on a dangerous mission to help her Vampirate friend, Lorcan, have his sight restored. Together, Lorcan and Grace visit the Vampirate Sanctuary where Grace finds herself in the middle again: she's not a blood donor or a Vampirate. She's an "in-between", which means she doesn't really belong.
Connor and Grace have never felt as lost as they do now, and as they both discover, it's getting harder to know who they can really trust...
Black Heart
There's a new ship of vampirates roaming the seas, leaving a trail of fear and devastation in its wake. When a high-profile pirate is slain, the Pirate Federation takes decisive action and begins training up a ship of dedicated vampire hunters. The team will be led by newly appointed Captain, Cheng Li and will include pirate prodigy Connor Tempest.
Meanwhile, Connor's twin sister Grace enjoys a bittersweet reunion with their mother. Sally Tempest has some important and shocking news that will leave the twins facing a very uncertain future.
Empire of Night
After the surprising revelation of the Tempest family history, twins Connor and Grace face a newly-defined future marked by their Vampirate roots. Meanwhile, Sidorio's evil Vampirate Empire continues its expansion, making it tragically apparent that no ship is safe. As for the pirates, they have a new wipe out the vampirates.
There's a bloody battle brewing in the seas, and each crew will need all hands on deck. And, this time, Grace and Connor may find themselves fighting for their lives-or against each other.
Immortal War
A bloody war is raging across the oceans, with the Pirate Federation and Nocturnals in alliance against the renegade Vampirates, led by Sidorio and Lola. Lola might be heavily pregnant with twins, but it doesn't stop her from remaining an active in battle!
Connor and Grace Tempest each have important roles to play - he as a pirate warrior at the heart of the fight; she as a powerful healer working with the war-wounded. As the twins face their greatest challenges to date, old allies and foes return to play their part in the ultimate battle of Pirate versus Vampirate.
In this, the conclusion of the Vampirates novels, the stakes are higher than ever. Relationships will change. An army of the dead will return to fight. There will be new threats and new alliances, and characters will die before the ending - which will see Grace and Connor poised to start momentous new journeys. In the words of Obsidian Darke, "So it ends, so it begins."
Found the first three in one of those book exchange boxes and thought, hey why not. I like reading about vampires maybe pirate ones will be a fun twist. Now with a book series titles Vampirates, I figured it would be a little silly, more along the lines of the How to Train Your Dragon book series, but its more like the movie, taking its subject matter much more seriously. This was a positive since the vampirate thing could have gotten really silly really fast.
Instead, you get a tale that takes place something around 500 years in the future, where ocean levels has risen but otherwise, you forget within pages that this is in the future till someone mentions the years. I'm not sure the point of putting it in the future other than to explain why there are old-style pirates on our modern seas, but the author I guess also didn't want to go to the past to bring back galleons.
The vampires have a unique nature but are still very much vampires, its always a risk to put your own twist on the folklore but works just fine here. We also have the pirates that seem, well, rather too nice really. Everyone is friendly and cheerful and...well they don't come off as crimminals. Connor takes to becoming a pirate after his father died like a fish to water...but we leave out the bit that pirates go around stealing and killing (and probably raping but this is a middle grade book). So we see a lot of the fun stuff, there's even a pirate school, which makes the whole career seem a great deal of fun, but the ethics of it aren't covered at all. Connor is a good guy, why does he take to thievery so easily?
Grace on the other hand doesn't care for the dangers of being a pirate...instead she's drawn to being a human on a ship full of vampires. But that makes her story all the more interesting, she's not into because being on that ship is fun, in fact its pretty scary, but she makes a few friends and when bad things happen to them, she wants to help. No ethical connundrums here.
And running through the first three books is a mystery, why are Grace and Connor so drawn to the Vampirate ship? Why did their father (they had no mother) teach them a vampirate sea shanty when most people think vampires are fantasy? There's clearly something there but the reveal is definitely taking its time. In fact, the whole series is taking its time, with time spent at a pirate school, and Grace going to the ship, then being sent away, then going to the ship, then being sent away...you know the angsty stuff but with a bit of a twist. Thus after three books while I learned a bit about that world, getting information about the vampires is a bit like, well, pulling teeth as the expression goes. Only in the third book do we even start scratching the surface of the nature of these Vampirates who give their name to the series. And I keep expecting the Vampirate captain to turn out to be their father or something...which probably won't be it but there's something definitely interesting there.
I must admit it kind of well, sucks, to be a vampire. If you don't want to go around killing everyone all the time you join the ship...and then just float around year after year. Its really a kind of prison, I mean what do people do all day long? Once a week the vampires get to feed and that seems about it, not a word on how they pass their time, must be incredibly boring and monotonous, both for the vampires and the donors!
However having gotten this far I will be running to the library to pick up the remaining three books, but as for the three I have I think they will go back in the book exchange box for another to enjoy.
June 2023
Indeed I'm glad I didn't stop since book four is the one that explains the mystery of the twins that was alluded to in the earlier books. It probably wasn't hard to guess, but the details might surprise. And by the time I got to book five I was pretty much into it, it was silly and absurd at times and the big twist at the end I saw coming some time before but just the same there's lots of action, adventure but also a lot of questions for the twins to deal with.
August 2023
By end of August I had finished the series. I was impressed, something with such a silly name turned out to be so serious and complex a tale. I even teared up a little there towards the end. The only major fault was in the world building. The vampire part was alright, though I was left with a lot of questions about that too (the whole Cardinal thing), but I really just couldn't wrap my mind around the setting. We're in the future but people fight with swords, but this isn't some dystopia where civilization has fallen apart, there must be a thriving civilization for the pirates to pillage after all, but there's almost never a mention of regular ships on the sea. Its like the whole tale takes place in some kind of oceanic void. It wasn't important to the series, but as I pointed out earlier, if you're going to put it 500 years in the future after climate change raised the ocean levels, I want to know more about that and why that time period selected, what happened to diesel ships, or even steam ships, why are we back to using sails (is it because we need to be environmentally friendly? But these are pirates, they are doing illegal stuff all the time so why not have a leg up on your victims?).
There are also some loose ends at the end as well, while the bad guys are defeated (this is middle grade/YA, you didn't think it would be grim dark and the villains win did you?) they aren't defeated definititely. I wonder if the author had plans for spin off, or just wanted to let the readers imagine what could happen next.
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