Seen at Bookish Antics! 
 When I was younger, I was a huge fan of Lemony Snicket; devouring A Series Of Unfortunate Events and anything else I could find by the elusive mastermind. When Snicket tried to branch off from his middle-grade books with Why We Broke Up, a Printz winning novel that critics loved, I was surprised to see how irritated I was by it. I decided to give Handler another shot and We Were Pirates sounded like it was totally my drift: a book about PIRATES with a glowing blurb by Neil Gaiman and that explores humanity in a comedic way. I was initially charmed by this one, but I quickly grew tired of this book despite it's short length. 
 What happens when a teenage girl gets tired of ordinary life? Gwen quickly joins a man with Alzheimer's and her outgoing friend on a journey to steal a ship and pretend to be pirates. This novel also explores the lack of a relationship between Gwen and her father, Phil who's fed up with the cards he's been dealt. 
 What could have been a smart comedy, turned out to be a dull, silly novel with little substance. The characters lack the vivacity that was apparent in Snicket's novels and are extremely unappealing and unsettling. I really disliked our entire cast of characters and couldn't find anything redeeming about them. To make matters worse, We Were Pirates borders on offensive making fun of Jewish people's noses and perpetuating various stereotypes when describing characters. Even though Handler is Jewish himself, it was totally uncalled for and inappropriate, but then again I probably shouldn't have expected more from the racist man who makes watermelon jokes. Anytime Handler used a stereotype, it just left me with a bad taste in my mouth. 
 This book clocks in at under 300 pages and is relatively short, but it felt much, much longer. The opening of this novel went by at a decent pace, but after that I kept turning pages and pages without making much progress. Each page was a bit of a struggle to get through and I found myself dreading continuing. I eventually decided to skim through the rest of the book and the ending was predictable and poorly constructed. I truly feel as if I had wasted my time reading this one and this novel was nothing like I expected. 
 We Were Pirates is a boldly offensive and unsuitable depiction of humanity's desire for adventure and how Alzheimer's affects the lives of friends and family. I think it's time for me to accept that Handler's novels aren't for me and that I shouldn't bother with them anymore. I'm truly upset about how terrible this novel was and I just can't get over that Snicket / Handler wrote this.