Much has changed for India Muerte. Once an ambitious street kid from Mexico Island without family, money, or experience of the wider world, now he’s an eager crewmember of the pirate ship the Devil’s Dress, sailing the Caribbean under the captaincy of his skeleton friend Grimmer in pursuit of adventure, glory, and stolen booty.
But sometimes adventures aren’t looked for. When the powerful and unscrupulous merchant king Hong Kong Silver demands the crew seek out the pirate revolutionary Ebon Caesar, they have no choice but to comply.
To find Caesar, they must travel beyond the Caribbean to Afrika, a vast land full of wonders and dangers. And that’s just the beginning of their troubles, for Caesar has his own dark plans . . .
INDIA MUERTE AND THE INDIGO CAVES is the second book in this pirate fantasy adventure series – the fast-paced and thrilling sequel to India Muerte and the Ship of the Dead.
One of the things I really love about a series of books is how we get to see characters that we come to know and love grow, change, and develop through their experiences. I think this is one of the most enjoyable aspects of the characterization in this series; I enjoy watching India become who he is going to be. There's a tangible jump in this book in terms of how he grapples with some moral nuances around the adventure he, and the crew, find themselves on. However, the standout aspect of The Indigo Caves was, for me, the passages in which the crew are travelling through Afrika. In the first book in the series it's clear that evocative prose and world-building is something the author excels at; this is even more obvious here. A luscious account of a world full of familiar, somewhat familiar, and utterly unfamiliar flora and fauna, that leaves the reader in a sort of dreamlike state of wonder.