Imagine an upper-class English girl kidnapped by pirates when she was 11, and eventually returned to her family. If this sounds familiar, you've probably either read the classic book A High Wind in Jamaica by Richard Hughes, or seen the movie. Whatever you may imagine, Jean Roberta has taken the grown-up Emily far beyond your - or the younger Emily's - wildest speculations.

"This is, indeed, a 'Bawdy Novella,' but there's more to it than that. Emily is a smart and spirited heroine, adventurous enough to see the bright side of the unspoken (and unfounded) assumption that she must be ‘damaged goods.' If her best friend at their elite girls' school ‘believed that I carried unspeakable knowledge like hidden treasure under my clothes,' all the better for getting, and sharing, such treasure. When the friend ultimately lacks the courage for a permanent relationship, Emily tosses off the constraints of 19th-century English society and returns to the sea on a more-or-less pirate ship manned by gay fugitives from the British Navy. The adventures that follow would be fun even without the sex, but sex does flow with more intoxicating effect than sailors' grog or pirates' rum.

While Emily does find female companionship, she is not too set in her ways to sample other couplings - or triplings, or more - and neither are her shipmates. The main characters are not only multi-talented as to sex, but multi-dimensional people. The historical setting, from England to the West Indies during the American Civil War, is convincing, and if the sex occasionally reaches into the realms of fantasy, what could be better for a decidedly Bawdy Novella?"