This book is cute, fun, silly, whimsical, and full of queer joy, just as advertised.

Unfortunately, it's also confusing and difficult to read, both on a line level and more broadly, for these reasons: - the proofreading feels sloppy, though it's hard to tell just how sloppy, because: - there's a lot of eye dialect. Can't have pirates without eye dialect! This particular pirate dialect feels very homebrew, speaking as someone who isn't a linguist. - there's a lot of maybe-figurative-maybe-not language, with weather phenomena or bits of ships being personified: things that feel like whimsical figures of speech, until the next sentence treats it as actual literal fact. This adds to the fun whimsical feel of the worldbuilding, but also makes it a lot more confusing to know what's actually going on. - it is very difficult to keep track of who is present in a scene and who is not. On a basic "who and what is where at what time and how are they moving" level, there are enough breaks in continuity that I pretty much gave up on keeping an overview and just had to go with the flow.

I haven't read much furry fiction since I was a child, so I may just be reaching for the most obvious point of comparison, but The Voyages of Cinrak the Dapper felt a lot like the Redwall books minus the feasting and warmongering. Not just because of the anthropomorphic animals having adventures, but the basic style of storytelling: dialogue-heavy, with immersive details and awesome images that kind of fall flat on me today (probably because these days I care a lot more about the effect of the language itself versus the semantic content of each sentence, compared with when I was young) but might well have captivated me as a child.

Another thing which struck me, which might be inherent to furry fiction over human characters: aggressive body neutrality. Cinrak is barrel-chested with an underbite and prominent front teeth because she is a capybara. These traits - any physical traits of any characters, with the possible exception of beards - are presented as absolutely neutral, not only without value judgements attached, but with no gendering component. In this respect, the book was a breath of fresh air.

Selling points: fun; low-stakes; queer joy; there's a lesbian capybara pirate captain.

Warnings: one instance of misgendering, promptly cracked down on; dubious continuity; confusing and difficult-to-read use of language.