Tide of Terror (2006)

"Plenty and Satiety
Pleasure and Ease
Liberty and Power"

How's that for a school motto?
In Book 2 of the Vampirates series, Tide of Terror by Justin Somper, the Tempest twins Grace and Conner find their way to the Pirate Academy. What ensues is a whirlwind adventure with flashing steel and clouded pasts, where everyone has dangerous secrets and friendships face heart wrenching dilemmas.

While the Tempest twins are together, this story is decidedly focused on Conner. Demons of the Ocean defined the differences of Conner and Grace by separating and placing them each in a different element, pirates and vampirates respectively. Tide of Terror focuses on the Pirate Academy, and consequently Conner, with Grace and the Vampirates left in the background as dream sequences and scenes of "meanwhile, elsewhere."

I saw an evolution of the author's writing style in this story. Although Books 1 and 2 have the common theme of "nothing is as it seems," the newer installment takes on a decidedly darker feel. A friend is killed in front of Conner, and a band of rouge vampirates is out on a killing spree on their way to find Grace. Also, aside from a few unimaginative names, i.e. Pirate Academy, this book as a whole seems to have lost the overly cliched devices used in Book 1.

I am curious to see if Justin Somper changes his style again in Book 3: Blood Captain. Hopefully Blood Captain will star Grace and keep the character development balanced. I also hope that the author doesn't out-write his age group by making the story too long or complicated later on; learning and development are wonderful, but another Harry Potter instance where the final book is four times as big as the first is something to avoid.

In this book two twins are about to have their lives to a complete 180. Their father had always sung and old shanty about Vampirates to calm them. But when their father dies they decide to take his boat and head out to sea. The twins get caught in a storm and the ship is completely and utterly destroyed. Grace is rescued by Lorcan a Vampirate on the ship The Nocturne. Connor is rescued by Cheng Li, deputy on the ship The Diablo. But what they don't realize is that things are brewing in the high seas, and that their world is about to change.

Vampirates 2 Tide of Terror is the second book in the Vampirates Series. This time, Grace gets Conner to go a pirate school. A place where kids preparing to take over their pirate parents' place as captains or want to live a life out at sea. Conner goes and actually has a better time than Grace. Although it's only because Grace starts having dreams of the Vampirates... especially Lorcan. Grace finds out that Lorcan's slowly dying. Grace does everything she can to return to the ship.

The story of the book is really good. It included a lot of useless details though. I only read it in breaks in class or after lunch. I was interested in the book like the first, but like the first, there were too many useless details for me to want to read it for a long time. Some times, I wouldn't even read a whole chapter a day because of the details. ( )

Who knew that in the future there would be an academy to train pirates? That's what we have in this second in the Vampirates series. Grace gets rescued from the vampirate ship at the end of DEMONS OF THE OCEAN and is now on the Diablo with her twin brother Connor. And they take a little visit to Pirate Academy to see if this might be the place for them.
The evil vampirate Sidorio is out there working on his new vampirate crew, so there's plenty of story to go around and tons of intrigue. Who can Grace and Connor trust?
This is such the perfect series to listen to. Whoever chose Daniel Philpott to narrate this wonderfully written tale oer the bounding main....chose wisely. He rivals Jim Dale (narrator of the Harry Potter series) in vocal dexterity.
Five arrrrrrrrrrgh beans!!!! ( )

Its really a great bookk.. cant wait till the next one comes out :D ( )