A boy sits in the town square on a low stool with a knobbly stick, and his job is to chase the birds away from a body. The man nailed to the post was a pirate captain; the governor had him pulled apart by horses, sewn back together and displayed, and gave orders that he was not even to be granted the crows. Every morning a tavern keeper crosses that square, and every morning she makes herself look. Tempest by Victoria Aveyard is being sold as a pirate romance, and it is one. It is also, underneath, a novel about what it costs to survive an empire, and about the people who did not.
The Sea Was Never Empty
The setting of Tempest by Victoria Aveyard is an invented archipelago with a very familiar shape. A northern empire with a lion on its flag, a rival kingdom with a green cross, sugar plantations, indentured contracts nobody can read before signing, and hundreds of islands claimed by crowns that have never seen them. One character signs three years of her life away at a dock in the capital and works out only afterwards that the terms will leave her poorer at the end than at the start.
The novel is precise about how that claiming worked. Fifty years before the story opens, explorers arrive and find not empty beaches but villages, temples and harbours. What follows is disease, burning and removal, and what remains a generation later is a stone arch in the water that nobody can explain, and a whisper in the trees. The parallel to the real TaÃno peoples of the Caribbean is not decorative, and Aveyard acknowledges the debt directly.
A group can read the first hundred pages as adventure. It becomes very hard to keep doing so.
The Scene Tempest by Victoria Aveyard Is Built Around
It comes late, in a dockside tavern, and it lasts about two pages.
A pirate captain rolls up his sleeve to show a woman the tattoo on his forearm: a scatter of small black diamonds she has always assumed were stars. They are islands. He names them in his own language, one by one, and then names them again in hers. Longdawn. Ambrose. Aleta.
And then the name of the island she has spent six months living on, an island she has thought of as a rock, a nothing, a place that produces no crops and holds no history. She realises, standing there, that the flat top of the hill might have been a market square. That the stones around the barn might have been a wall. That the little grove of trees casting the only shade might have been somebody’s orchard.
Nobody delivers a speech. She simply says that the island is not hers, that nothing really is. He answers that when nothing belongs to anyone, nothing can be taken, and then observes that this is not the world they were given.
That exchange is the load-bearing wall of Tempest by Victoria Aveyard, and any group that skims it will spend the rest of the book reading a different and much smaller novel.
What Victoria Aveyard Does With the Pirates
The reading group question here is sharper than it first looks: is a pirate republic a real alternative to an empire, or just a smaller one with better manners?
Aveyard makes the case as strongly as it can be made. Her pirates elect their captains and can vote them out, which is more say than any sailor of the fleet will ever have. Their crews are stuffed with men who walked away from the navies of three different crowns, most of them press-ganged orphans and debtors’ sons who were given no say in serving at all. They offer a captured crew a genuine choice. And they do not deal in flesh, and they say so out loud, more than once, to people who assume otherwise.
They also board merchant ships, take what they want at gunpoint and kill anyone who resists.
The novel does not resolve this, and the refusal is deliberate. One character calls the pirates vultures picking at a carcass. Another points out that taxes are robbery too, and that the navy does its own pillaging from the orphanages of the capital. Both are right. Bring it to the table and let the group fight about it.
Where a Group Will Push Back
Not everything in the five hundred pages of Tempest by Victoria Aveyard earns its place.
- It ends mid-sentence. This is half a duology, and the last chapter is a cliffhanger told from a new point of view. Nothing closes.
- The romance keeps stopping. Ten years of longing, and the on-page relationship rarely gets past an interrupted kiss.
- Two long stretches idle. One in each timeline, both essentially reconnaissance.
- The fantasy arrives very late. For most of the book there is no magic at all, and readers promised some may feel misled either at the start or at the end.
Questions Worth Bringing
The obvious one first, because it is genuinely hard: the protagonist did something unforgivable to save her own life, and Tempest by Victoria Aveyard refuses to condemn her for it. Ask whether the group can hold both of those at once, and whether they would have done differently with a rope in the room. It is worth noticing that every single person in the novel who calls her a traitor is also, by somebody’s law, a criminal.
The better question is quieter. The novel keeps score of who gets remembered. A dead man is promised he will be forgotten entirely; an erased people are remembered only in a tattoo and a prayer. Ask the group who in this book gets to write the record, and what that costs everyone who does not.
Groups that finish this and want a companion should start with Babel by R.F. Kuang, which asks the same question about complicity with far more anger. Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang follows a woman who discovers what her comfortable city is built on. The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri takes an island and a conquest and makes them intimate. And Fallen City by Adrienne Young is the pure salt-and-rope pleasure, for anyone who wants the sea without the argument.
What It Leaves Behind
There is a farewell that everyone in these waters says to everyone else, sailor to sailor, priest to stranger, enemy to enemy: may the sea always sing for you. It appears dozens of times, and by the end it has worn a groove.
The woman at the centre of Tempest by Victoria Aveyard does not believe a word of it. She says it anyway, because it is what people say here, and because the only faith she has left is in coin and her own two hands. Whether the sea is listening is the question the sequel exists to answer. What stays with a group in the meantime is smaller and harder: a stolen island, a boy with a stick, and a list of names read out twice.