Compass Rose by Anna Burke

GUEST REVIEW by my friend Lucy (@lucyhouli): I’ll be honest, I don’t read a lot of romance novels. But I picked this one up because when someone says “lesbian pirates” it's difficult to turn down such an opportunity.

The first chapter started a bit predictable with its “I bet you’re wondering why I was named Compass Rose,” but as soon as the book dives into the plot I couldn’t put it down. We’ve got powerful women literally everywhere we look, with only 4 men even named across the whole story. There’s fighting and betrayal and longing and some excellent make-out sessions. It’s a story about loyalty and picking your own path. Plus, it does an amazing job of world-building a post-apocalyptic future where the entirety of humanity lives on boats on a poisonous ocean.

It takes some fun twists and turns that I was game for, and I would absolutely recommend it to a friend.

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Based on Lucy’s voracious tear through this book, I borrowed it from her immediately. Usually, I’m nice to books and I will try, but I just don’t have a lot of good things to say…I dunno, I’ll try.

I, too, was captivated by the concept of lesbian pirates. This is a new adult post-apocalypse “romance,” where Compass Rose, the star navigator of the Archipelago’s fleet, is sent on a spy mission to live with mercenaries and… well, I think it was to gather information about pirates trying to take over the Archipelago’s mine. Honestly, I’m a little hazy on the reasoning behind anything in this book.

Compass Rose is Anna Burke’s first novel and suffers from some early work issues, the most obvious of which is setting up and executing plot points. This book plods along from one point to another setting them up in neat little rows, when in actuality, some points need to be set up in chapter 1 to pay off in chapter 20. It can’t just be this then this then this. That doesn’t let the reader’s imagination ruminate on anything, to wonder, to go off on possible tangents about where this story is going.

Another fumble, in my opinion, was how tension was not built at all. We never get let into WHY Rose feels what she feels when she feels it. She just experiences something, reacts, and moves on, never being let into her actual inner thoughts, just her surface ones. Maybe that’s the true issue, this book was ironically all surface even though 95% takes place on submarines. It desperately tried to show the reader, rather than tell the reader, but didn’t quite succeed.

Lastly, Burke kept setting up something about Rose’s heritage; why/how she was so good at navigating, AND IT NEVER PAYS OFF. Did that chapter get deleted? What happened? Don’t set up something mythical and just say, a myth is just a myth. THAT’S SOME BLUE BALLING BULLSHIT.

::deep breath:: ::recentering::

What I did love about this book? It is set in the aftermath of the slow world-death humanity is causing with pollution, plastics, and global warming. The world was just as dangerous as the people and humanity deserved to be forced underwater for how we treat this planet. -Ford