Avi's insistence on a modern feminist's point of view on the significance of the events on the Seahawk is jarringly anachronistic, although it probably accounts for much of the acclaim for The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle and for much of its appeal to young people, for whom the feminism is likely to be familiar. Charlotte Doyle is a repressed youngster, although she does not know it. Her education has been aimed primarily at her becoming a proper gentlewoman who knows all the graces that upper-class women are supposed to know. Most of her development in The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle involves her trying to apply the rules for conduct that she has learned to a tense, eventually desperate, situation on the Seahawk. When she becomes convinced that she was at fault for the crew being short two men, although events eventually reveal that Captain...