what an adventure! a man of honor =)

Это просто книга-машина времени, которая переносит тебя в те беззаботные времена, когда волновало только, найдут ли моряки Испаньолы заветные сокровища и доберётся ли в итоге Айвенго к своей Ровене.

Ушло в копилочку классического приключенческого романа, который нужно советовать читать детям и подросткам.

I loved this book! Pirates are awesome and I have to admit that this is the first time I have read a pirate novel. I had to read this for a film a literature class that I am taking. This was a great choice for this class. The adventures Blood goes on are full of action and the dialogue is amazing. The film adaption to this novel is an old black and white movie. The acting is pretty cheesy but it's great considering the year it was made. This novel makes me want to read more piarate adventure stories. It also makes me wonder what other books are out there that I've never heard of that I need to read.

This is a book about pirates, treasure, swordfights, betrayal, cannonballs, Caribbean islands, the roaring main, and ladies in fetching corsets.

The last thing you'd expect from such a book is for it to get tiresome and repetitive, to trudge through the same formulaic episodes again and again, to gloss over the kick-ass rapier duels in order to linger on the minutiae of colonial administration - and yet this is what happens.

Here's every chapter of this book, pretty much: Captain Blood is in a sticky situation. Nobody thinks he can get out of it alive. Captain Blood comes up with a plan just crazy enough to work. The plan works. Everyone talks about how amazing Captain Blood is.

This is great the first few times. But the protagonist's relentless suavity and brilliance starts to get old, and eventually becomes downright irritating. I mean, this guy can do no wrong. From his piercing blue eyes (described in numerous faintly erotic passages) to his impeccable fashion sense, from his unerring eye for strategy to his skills as a miracle healer, Peter Blood is perfect.

He can't lose a fight. Two seventy-gun Spanish warships? No problem, consider those puppies sunk. Invincible stone fortress? Flattened. Drunken pirate king with a cutlass? Dead in two sentences.

It starts to get ludicrous. Captain Blood is eloquent, handsome, and has a finely calibrated sense of honor. His enemies are unfailingly ugly, vicious, small-minded brutes. And then there's the love interest, Arabella, as boring as she is "slim, cool, and beautiful."

Captain Blood is a good read for putting in context why writers and readers turned increasingly over the course of the 20th century toward the flawed, fallible hero (or in some cases anti-hero). He or she is much more interesting. Captain Blood, vaulting from triumph to triumph despite the odds stacked against him, quickly grows dull.

That said, you can also see why this book has survived when most of its ilk are forgotten. Sabatini is a better-than-average writer in the adventure genre, though he expends most of his energy in long scenes of two men declaiming angrily at one another, or the aforementioned hot-and-bothered descriptions of Captain Blood. And it's a prototypical pirate adventure tale, employing every sturdy cliche - in fact, it's probably responsible for creating a lot of those cliches.

Suggested further reading would be Richard Hughes' [b: A High Wind in Jamaica|188458|A High Wind in Jamaica|Richard Hughes|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1388190660s/188458.jpg|2166961], written about seven years later, which subverts every expectation of the pirate genre while still involving lots of bloodshed, subterfuge, and seafaring.

This book is rather soft, it's sprinkled with quality humor and it presents rather chiseled characters. The unoriginality coming from copying the adventures of Henry Morgan is, then, to be ignored as there is still much room for improvisation between them and the author takes advantage of that. Like in [b:Scaramouche|938105|Scaramouche|Rafael Sabatini|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387767649s/938105.jpg|1370942], the author mixes quite different professions for the greater exotic impact.

This was exactly what I was looking for when I decided I wanted a story about pirates. Adventure, drama, romance: all of that.

I wish the commentary on enslavement had gone further, and some of the language might put some people off. However, I genuinely had a great time reading this. It was just really fun.

4.5★

With the world in crisis, this is the sort of escapist reread I needed!

Unjustly convicted after the Monmouth rebellion for an act of humanity,Dr Peter Blood is transported to the Caribbean & becomes a slave to the cruel Colonel Bishop. The colonel has a lovely niece...

On about my tenth read I still loved this book, although it doesn't hold up to rereading as well as the author's [b:Scaramouche|938105|Scaramouche (Scaramouche, #1)|Rafael Sabatini|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1387767649l/938105._SY75_.jpg|1370942] did. The hero and heroine are both appealing characters

Spoiler

although man, Blood really needs to let go! One remark by Arabella colours his actions for chapters. And chapters. And...

I loved the physical description of Arabella - I could see her in front of me. So far all the Sabatini's I have read have given his heroines very varied descriptions.

While there are exciting parts where I could scarcely bear to put the book down, there are also parts that drag. Sadly the heroine appears only in Peter's thoughts for large chunks of the book. I knocked half a ★ off my rating, but keep in mind if you are more a reader of the historical than the historical romance genre things that bothered me may not bother you.

https://wordpress.com/view/carolshessonovel.wordpress.com

Swashing! Buckling! What a fun, light bit of entertainment. As a longtime ardent fan of the naval adventure stories of Patrick O'Brien, I was disposed to like this book. But still, it was a surprisingly enjoyable read. Or in my case listen, as I got this as an audiobook. Peter Blood is a former soldier retired to country life as a doctor in 17th century England. When called to treat a man wounded in the Monmouth Rebellion, he is arrested for treason by the king's men. Shipped to the Caribbean, he finds himself the property of a cruel landowner who happens to have a gorgeous niece. The rest of the plot is completely expected, but still enjoyable. He escapes his slavery, takes to the life of a pirate and somehow must find a way to win the lovely Arabella. Written in the 1920s, there are some nasty racist attitudes (the white slaves are terribly oppressed, noble figures; but the black slaves are beneath the author's real notice). The writing can seem pedestrian (I lost count of how many times Blood was described as having "startling blue eyes in a tawny face"), but in action and plotting, Sabatini excels. It was also filmed as great action film featuring Errol Flynn in his first starring role.