Mississippi Jack: Being an Account of the Further Waterborne Adventures of Jacky Faber, Midshipman, Fine Lady, and Lily of the West

by L.A. Meyer

Book Overview

The intrepid Jacky Faber, having once again eluded British authorities, heads west, hoping that no one will recognize her in the wilds of America. There she tricks the tall-tale hero Mike Fink out of his flatboat, equips it as a floating casino-showboat, and heads south to New Orleans, battling murderous bandits, British soldiers, and other scoundrels along the way. Will Jacky's carelessness and impulsive actions ultimately cause her beloved Jaimy...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0152060030
• ISBN13: 9780152060039
• Release Date: September 2007
• Publisher: Clarion Books
• Length: 624 Pages
• Weight: 1.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 5.5" x 8.3"
• Age Range: 12 years and up
• Grade Range: Grade 7 and higher

Customer Reviews

Jacky goes west!

The volume picks up at the end of the last ending, Jacky and her classmates have made it home to Boston. But the British captain who picked them up isn't letting her go considering the reward out on her head. He just didn't remember the adage 'hell have no fury, like a woman scorned', but in this case its a whole tribe of American Amazon's out for blood. 'This is a man whose faced down cannonades, boarding parties, the peppering of sharpshooters, and cruel unforgiving clouds of flying splinters' (You'd love how the Lawson Peabody student body ends up in court facing charges of inciting a riot.) Jacky with friends help gets loose and with Higgins heads west to get away from the reaching hands of her country where she ends up meeting with the high functioning alcoholic American folk hero Mike Fink who she tricks out of his river boat and heads on down to New Orleans all with Jaimy following behind viewing her destruction from hole in rock, to her kissing a British officer.

Not my personal favorite, but introduces my favorite character in the series

This book is the longest in the 12 part series. Even though it isn't my personal favorite in the series I still find it a captivating read which says a lot. Jacky gets up to some mischief some created on her own and some thrust upon her. I love how at this point it is clear that despite how smart she is, Jacky at times is also quite dense and well dumb. She makes mistakes and she has emotions and personally it is what draws me to her. She is so fleshed out when it comes to her feelings and actions that it makes me envious and root for her even at her most tragic moments. She can be so frustrating, but it makes her so human and real I can't help but love her and that is why I love the series.

Goooooo Jackyyyyyy!!!!

I absolutly loved this book! All the dry humor in it left me cracking up! The auther, being a guy, was good at placing a girls feelings. Though I secpect he had some help from his wife. This is the 5th book but the most beuteful. It'll leave you begging for more!!!!

Another rousing Jacky Faber adventure...

In this, the 5th novel in the picaresque/historical fiction series about the adventures/misadventures of the irrepressible Jacky Faber, we see our heroine again narrowly escaping transport back to England to be hanged for piracy. Jacky then begins another rousing adventure tale as she travels west to the Allegheny-Ohio-Mississippi Rivers on her way to New Orleans, meeting characters along the way that sound like they could have come from the pens of Mark twain, James Fenimore Cooper, and George MacDonald Fraser. She meets and shelters a runaway slave named Solomon (just like Twain's Huck Finn and Jim), a free-spirited backwoodsman and a Shawnee, Lightfoot Bumpus & Chee-a-quat, (Cooper's Natty "Leatherstocking" Bumppo & the Mohican Chingachgook), Royal Navy Lieutenant Flashby and Captain Richard Lord Allen (sharing the good and bad traits of Fraser's anti-heroic rogue Harry Flashman). The author, Louis A. Meyer, throws in the "Larger Than Life" Mike Fink of American Folklore and many other interesting (albeit flawed) folks. Jacky seems to have a knack for getting into trouble and thoroughly loves the attention she receives (except for the rough handling, imprisonment, and tar and feathering parts, that is). All in all, this is one heck of an exciting riverboat ride and the most rollicking Jacky Faber escapade yet. I highly recommend this and the other books in the series.

The thrill of history

A good book -- and this is very good -- ought to excite you in some way...even if it is a quiet thrill. This book isn't quiet. Jacky Faber is never dull, and she leads a most exciting, adventurous life. No. 5 in the series -- and I've read them all -- is full of twists and turns, plots and perils. If you like history (and I have all my life), then welcome to American history as a story told as wide and deep as the mighty Mississippi itself.

Best series going!

While everyone else was waiting for the last Harry Potter book, the new Stephenie Meyer book, the new Christopher Paolini book, this is the one that I was highly anticipating. The Bloody Jack series has to be the best series going, bar none, including a couple of my other favorites, like Connelly's Harry Bosch and Laura Lippman's Tess Monaghan. Of course, this is historical fiction, not mystery or fantasy, so perhaps it's not fair to compare them. But L. A. Meyer is an outstanding storyteller. These are the kinds of books you want to last and never end, but you cannot stop reading. Meyer mixes up past and present tense, straight narrative with letters and journals, but it all blends seamlessly. I just finished the book a couple days ago, and right now I consider it the best book I've read this year. It has everything - adventure, history, romance, tragedy, excitement, violence, sentimentality, pathos, and all in the guise of "young adult" fiction. Since most of this book takes place along the Mississippi (and Ohio) Rivers, it's hard not to think of a later writer, Mark Twain, in the same territory, and I think Twain would've liked Jacky Faber and her adventures. There are certainly echoes of Huck and Jim's story in this book, and Meyer does justice to these themes. The book is set in 1806 (one year before Britain outlawed slavery, just three years after the Louisiana Purchase) and Meyer illuminates the times wonderfully. I have a friend in his sixties who loves these books and gives them as presents to his nieces and nephews, as well as his mother, who also loves the series (she's in her eighties). Start with Bloody Jack, the first book, and you too will be hooked.

From London waif to riverboat queen

Mary "Jacky" Faber -- from homeless waif to ship's boy in the British navy, pirate, serving girl, lady in training, actress, musician, privateer, slave -- and now, riverboat queen. If you recall the end of "In the Belly of the Bloodhound," the fourth book in Jacky's ongoing series of adventures set in the early 19th century, our heroine had escaped the clutches of vile slavers and sailed her captured ship back to Boston when, just as she disembarked with her schoolmates in triumph, she found herself arrested for crimes against the English crown. But, while Jacky has spent her fair share of time as a captive on both land and sea, it rarely proves easy to hold her -- and, soon enough, and in the wake of a massive riot in her name, Jacky is fleeing Boston for the relative safety of the inland United States. I was a little worried at the onset of "Mississippi Jack" that a journey down a river wouldn't afford our plucky young heroine with enough opportunities for mischief and adventure. But not to worry, for author Louis A. Meyer has Jacky's fate well in hand. Jacky, for all the many years of experience under her petticoats -- when she wears them, the scamp -- has grown no wiser nor more sedate. She is an endless source of entertainment; she is brassy, clever, immodest, bold, flighty, romantic, impulsive, loyal, commanding and downright fun. This chapter in her growing life's story draws on a wealth of riverboat lore, from tent revivals to floating casinos. There are noble savages and fierce Indian raiders, treacherous British agents, trappers and traders, slaves and slavers, whores, pirates and thieves. Jacky rises to the top of it all, like cream on milk, and this book, like its predecessors, leaves you wanting more. I'm happy to hear that Meyer is already hard at work on the next chapter in Faber's exciting saga. by Tom Knapp, Rambles.N E T editor