2. My Salty Mary by Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows

I've been working through this series for a couple of years. Thomas and Ryan tracked them all down for me after I watched, and fell in love, with the first book in the series My Lady Jane. Strictly speaking, the six books are split in two series: three books for three different historic and literary Janes and three for three similar Marys. My Salty Mary is the last of them. I've finished the series. It's always a bitter-sweet experience to finish off a series that you've loved. 

My Salty Mary is a fictionalized alternate history based around one of the women pirates during the Golden Age of Piracy: Mary Read. In this version of her life, her story is combined with the story of the Little Mermaid. In this version, when the little mermaid is rejected by her prince she doesn't turn into sea foam the way everyone assumes she will. She has the opportunity to return home, but instead, she tosses herself into the ocean on a fit of despair and is rescued by a pirate crew who assume she is a boy because of the way she is dressed. She adopts a human name and an alias for her disguised self.

It turns out that she's pretty good at being a pirate. Only her best friend Tobias knows that she's a girl and even he doesn't know that she used to be a mermaid. It's pretty clear that Tobias has a crush on her, but after her experience with a vapid prince, she has no interest in love. It's a swashbuckling adventure with brawls and dastardly plots, but at it's core it's a really sweet love story wrapped around a coming of age narrative.

Of the six books in the series, this is one of my favorite. The internal conflict felt compelling and I really liked the way the authors incorporated various elements of pirate history into the story. Anyone who like the Pirates of the Caribbean series is likely to enjoy this as well.