The Red Crystal

The Pirate & The Princess #2

by Mio Chizuru

The Pirate and the Princess is adventure on the high seas with a twist - the pirate is a girl. She looks like Keira Knightly, but is really over 200 years old. Her name is Yuri, and once, she lived in the future. She can't return there until she rights a terrible wrong, and thereby redeems herself and fulfills her destiny. Princess Noelle is not from another time, but another place. A land that was invaded by evil conquerors, who killed her parents and kidnapped her younger brother. The Princess herself, 10 years old, was taken hostage, until Yuri saved her. It was then they learned that Noelle holds part of the key to Captain Yuri's destiny. Both Yuri and Noelle want nothing more than to go home. But until Noelle finds her brother, and Yuri vanquishes the evil she herself accidentally set into motion, neither can. Until then, Captain Yuri and Princes Noelle, along with the wacky and brave pirate crew of the Eurastia roam the seas, fighting for good, battling evil - and trying to find their way home.

Paperback

First published April 15, 2008

Reviews

[Evee · Rating 5 out of 5]

i think this book will be just as good as the first!

[Sol]

Hi hi, I just wanted to post this here with my findings about this book because much like everyone else, I've been looking for it and have been unable to find it!

I got into direct contact with Seven Seas marketing team asking after it (seeing as I bought the first volume of this series 18 years ago at my 3rd grade Scholastic Book Fair) and my response from the Press & Marketing team was, verbatim quote, "Book 1 was a Scholastic Book Fair exclusive, and I'm afraid we never published Book 2 and beyond."

I also found a discussion on English Light Novels from a forum poster named Nick about six years ago where they said:

"Unfortunately, only book #1 in this series (The Pirate and the Princess: The Timelight Stone) was ever published in English before the series was cancelled by its English-language publisher. #2 (The Red Crystal) and #3 (The Sea Dragon’s Tears) were apparently close to release when this happened, as they had ISBN numbers assigned and were listed on many book marketplaces. However, to our knowledge, no English-language copies of these books were ever printed or sold.
This appears to have happened a number of times with series that were planned for release before digital publishing emerged as a less financially-risky alternative to paper-and-ink publishing. Hopefully the new generation of publishers will consider relicensing some of these titles as they grow more confident in the new marketplace."

So if you're searching for a place to purchase this book and the next, unfortunately, it seems impossible to do so. The fact that there are IBSN numbers and publishing dates here on Goodreads is a bit inadvertently misleading. I'm having trouble even finding editions of this book in Japanese, so it must be very, very out of print.
Here is the Japanese wikipedia page for the series. The series is called "The Girl Pirate Yuri" (少女海賊ユーリ) in Japanese, and here is Mio Chizuru's twitter page, which is just another thing I stumbled upon during my search.

This book in particular, The Red Crystal, seems to actually be called "The Island or Time" or "The Island Where Time Stopped" in Japanese (I could only get a machine translation so I'm not really sure which is totally right.) For those looking to purchase a Japanese edition, hope is slim, but doing an IBSN search on ja.wikipedia yielded these results.

I hope this helps someone!

[James Fortner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favorite book series and I read it every day.