This book was not very good. And I say this as a paid-up fan of the (first three) Pirates of the Caribbean films. They're stupid and confusing and too long, but there's a vibe to them. As a professional hater of origin stories I have to admit my expectations were low for this prequel novel, but I was willing to give it a chance, given the reviewers at GoodReads saw fit to give it a 4.21 out of a possible 5 stars.

Ann Carol Crispin's The Price of Freedom manages to live up to the films in terms of length (at over 650 pages), and the characters and locations all have the right names. But it shares very little else in common with the films. The slapstick comedy, acrobatics, and extended action sequences are entirely missing, and some of the characters unrecognisable.

Jack Sparrow in particular, in his guise as a salaried employee of the East India Trading Company, is portrayed as an intensely moral and thoughtful champion of the rights of others - a far cry from the films' morally grey black villain who is perfectly content to condemn someone to death to get his own way.

By focussing on the slave trade, the book seems to be trying to address an aspect of the Age of Exploration which, to be fair, is glaringly missing from the film series. But that seems to misunderstand the franchise as seriously engaging with the actual history of the 18th century, and not meeting it on its own terms as just a romp through the seas with skeleton pirates and ocean demigods.

Cutler Beckett, who in the films is portrayed as a status-obsessed aristocrat, is revealed to be a status-obsessed aristocrat who was bullied as a young child, giving about a millimetre of depth to the character. His fixer Mercer, is inexplicably revealed to be Scottish - at odds with the sinister Northern English accent given by David Schofield in installments two and three of the film series.

Predictably, there are many moments in the book where it feels like the author is looking back at you over her shoulder and checking you got all the references she dropped in for us (to be fair, even the films go a little far with the whole "why is the rum always gone?" shtick).

The book holds up neither as a worthwhile supplement to the films, nor as a novel in its own right. It's not worth reading (and in hindsight certainly not worth finishing). But on the other hand it does have a beautiful cover.