Executive

A Guide to Becoming a Pirate Queen

By: Jayde Russell

Narrated by: Janine Granda

Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

Sometimes demon summonings go wrong, and that’s not always a bad thing...

Bryce Virra was a corporate executive in charge of the New Eden mining colony. But when a group of terrorists learn about her illegal weapons research, they decide to put a stop to it by sacrificing her to a demon. It doesn’t go well.

Now, with her captors dead and her secret out, Bryce can no longer rely on the corporation that was protecting her from a dark past. She’ll need to find a ship, form a crew, and learn to navigate the galaxy’s criminal underworld in order to survive.

But first she needs to negotiate a deal with the devil who was summoned to kill her. A deal that could change both of their lives forever.

Content warning: strong profanity, violence, dark themes, kidnapping, torture, alcohol and drug use, implied sexual situations, heavy-handed trauma, mild piracy, poorly executed demon summoning, a rushed sapphic relationship, bad puns, really bad sex puns, dragon crime lords, werewolf gangsters, blatant spoiling of a fictional romance novel, and over representation/normalization of gay and/or queer characters.

This novel is the published version of my free web novel available here: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/54915/a-guide-to-becoming-a-pirate-queen

©2022 Jayde Russell (P)2022 Jayde Russell

amazing audio book

can't wait for the second book to come out. I love the voice actor

Excellent!!!

This book has it all! Adventure! Comedy! Romance! Cutting-edge, creativity! It leaves you filled with a great experience and counting the minutes for the next book to come out. Looking forward to more amazing ness from Jayde Russell!

Something for Everybody

A interplanetary corporate executive ends up turning to piracy when she becomes hunted by mobsters and set upon by an assassin. This one's an unusual story, a bit pirate, a bit romance, a bit LGBTQ, a lot of suspense and even funny in a lot of places. I sometimes found it hard to follow, but it was an interesting read.

Relentlessly queer science fantasy action romance

I absolutely adore the world Jayde has created for this story and have been following the web novel on Royalroad since before the audiobook version came out.

The setting is a mix of science fiction and fantasy, where futuristic technology and magic have been seamlessly merged and that is populated by classic fantasy races like elves and dwarves as well as extraplanar entities like gods, demons and devils. All is not well however, as civilised space is dominated by megacorporations that are joined at the hip to the vestigial remnants of civilian governance.

The story follows the elf Bryce Virra and her devil girlfriend Salinthea (but her friends call her Thea) on a whirlwind adventure and romance trying to navigate the aftermath of the failed demon summoning that brought the two of them together as prospective blood sacrifice and wrongly summoned devil. The rest of the cast that the two meet along the way also provides a veritable smorgasbord of queer characters, where every stripe of the rainbow flag will find themselves. At the same time it is also an unapologetically sex-positive story that, without ever becoming explicit, has room for both polygamy and asexuality and treats them both seriously and respectfully.
The narrative itself follows the points of view of the four main characters that form the found family that Bryce and Thea assemble along the way, regularly shifting focus as the story demands and blending fast-paced action with slower-paced relationship building between the main characters and supporting cast.

As the narrator for the audio book, Janine Granda's performance absolutely knocks it out of the park, elevating scenes that were already great in writing to perfection through her fantastic character work.

Whether you found this as someone looking for WLW romance or space-fantasy action, I'd strongly recommend you give it a try.

Simply Amazing!

Absolutely amazing book so far and the narrator chosen fits the story perfectly!! 10/10 would recommend!

Follows my favorite format, but…

I really look for sci-fi action adventure stories with just a little bit of romance woven in through the action, I am a traditionalist as far as the romance is concerned. I’m not a big fan of LGBTQ romances. However fearing that my prejudices were showing and since this still seemed to follow my favorite format I continued listening. I do expect to be “sitting on the edge of my seat” by chapter 14. I wasn’t and had no more desire to pursue the story.