Cinnamon and Gunpowder: A Novel

This is a very difficult book for me to rate. I loved the concept: kind of a “1001 Nights” type story about a chef kidnapped by pirates who can keep himself alive only if he makes a special meal for the enigmatic captain every Sunday.

The cooking and food descriptions are great, and the inventiveness that the main character uses to create meals he knows within the limitations of being at sea are clever and fun.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book is very weird. The book starts out with an almost lighthearted swashbuckling tone, but then veers wildly into a darker type of story where major characters are dying left and right. There is a minor “mystery” subplot about a saboteur on board but it is immediately obvious who it is so there's not a lot of suspense there. A few of the characters are standouts (Mr Apples was great, and while he was basically a plot device I liked Joshua) but most of them are flat and stereotypical (the Chinese twins, everyone involved with the Brass Fox). Sometimes there were huge revelations about characters that never went anywhere, and the confrontation that the whole book builds up to ends in under ten pages.

I feel like a lot of the historical issues were not understood particularly well (multiple characters imply that Americans dumped tea into the sea because of the unethical way it was acquired), which would have been fine in a more fanciful pirate story but not the more serious story the book became.