This review was first posted on http://www.rubysreads.com. 
 I have to start this review with a disclaimer: I'm not much into Time Travel stories. I love historicals and I love contemporaries, but the idea of mixing the two has never appealed to me. My feeling on pirate tales is mixed, though. I read Bloody Jack by L.A. Meyer and liked it okay, but didn't feel compelled to keep up with the series. I loved Celia Rees' Pirates! I hoped for a sequel but this point I've given up hope. If you're familiar with these books you'll know that they also feature female pirates. I was willing to give Steel a try because I've been thinking about reading Carrie Vaughn's Kitty Norville series and I thought it would be a good way to give her work a try. A test drive, so to speak. I'm sad to say that Steel wasn't my cup of tea, but my disclaimer is my way of pointing out that I wasn't the book's target audience. I think that fans of YA historical fiction will be able to give this book a fairer assessment than my own. That said, I'm going on with my review. It's your choice whether, after such a disclaimer, you want to read it or not. 
 Steel opens with the main character losing a very important fencing tournament. The loss hits her where it hurts most--her self-confidence. Even when her family takes a vacation to Nassau, she isn't able to separate herself from her disappointment. One day, Jill finds a rusty sword tip in the sand. Because it has special significance for her, Jill picks it up. The sword tip is the catalyst for what happens next: Jill falls overboard during a pleasure cruise and is rescued by a group of pirates. Lucky for her, though the pirates are male, they have a female captain. Even luckier, the pirate captain (Margery Cooper) takes a fancy to her. Though bewildered by what has happened to her, Jill has no choice but to sign up as one of Cooper's pirates. And though Jill expects life as a pirate to be as violent and blood-thirsty as the legends, she finds that it's more a matter of lots of hard work, especially cleaning. Jill also meets Henry, a boy whose mother was brought over from Africa as a slave. He signed on as one of Cooper's pirates when her crew captured the boat he worked on. Henry acts as Jill's pirate mentor. He's also, ultimately, her love interest and erstwhile fencing coach. 
 Carrie Vaughn clearly researched pirate life in the Caribbean in the 1700's. There are lots of interesting details--both historical and piratical. However, one of the things that always comes to my mind when I think of traveling to the past is personal hygiene. In particular, oral hygiene. Every time I read a Time Travel novel (which is, as I've said, not that often), I expect the time traveler to have the same issues. I don't think he/she'd be able to help it. A pirate ship strikes me as the kind of environment where the lack of modern conveniences (and ideas of cleanliness) would be sorely, sorely missed. It would be enough to turn anyone OCD. Jill adjusts to these changes fairly quickly. I suppose if you would have to, if time travel were really possible. I just find it hard to believe that Jill wouldn't have spent more time lamenting her folly in not putting her toothbrush in her pocket before she left the hotel that morning. I'm not saying that she should have spent many pages droning on about it, but a little freaking out seemed in order. 
 The writing of Steel was good, but not particularly special. I also never really connected to Jill as a character. She did and said all the right things and was sympathetic but, again, nothing special. All the characters fell a little flat to me, even the villain. Especially Cooper, whom I wanted to get excited about but couldn't. The biggest disappointment for me was the end, though. With time travel novels, there's rarely a completely happy ending. If the character stays in the past, he or she never sees his or her family again. If he (oh, I give up) stays in the future, he leaves behind the people he met in the past. But it doesn't matter, because the conflict in Steel is primarily man v. self. It has to do with Jill moving past the past. Which is kind of funny when you put it that way. 
 Vaughn goes out of her way to deglamorize the life of the 18th Century pirate. She also doesn't shy away from the issue of slavery. But I think that the thing that was least successful for me was all the fencing stuff. I've never fenced in my life so those scenes bored me stiff. I also got tired of all the cleaning Jill has to do. I get it: being a pirate was lots of hard work, not leaning drunkenly off the mainsail. But if I wanted to read about cleaning...well, I don't. I dragged myself to the finish line with this one, but as I said above, I'm not this book's target audience. And, sadly, I'm not in the least inspired to read the Kitty Norville books, now!