If there’s one post I ought to be able to write in my sleep, it would be about pirates, and books to do with pirates.
(After three days’ hard spring cleaning, I might just fall asleep while writing, so let’s keep it to an easy topic.)
I like it when a child has a particular, ongoing interest. It makes present buying easier, for a start. And you can have big ongoing conversations about what they are keen on, and what they’ve found out about next.
Junior Reader does pirates. BIG interest: four years and counting kind of interest. So you can guess that has an impact on what we look for in libraries, second-hand bookshops and so on.
I suspect that I could write a few posts purely about pirate books, with the number we’ve read, but I’ll try to keep it to some of the favourites for now.
===
Picture books
I wouldn’t like to pick one favourite, but high up the list would have to be Captain Flinn and the Pirate Dinosaurs. Boy likes pirates AND dinosaurs: good start. Text by the adept Giles Andrae, nice cartoony pics by Russell Ayto.
(Good example of a mash-up too – something I want to write about some time – ie sticking two separate but favoured themes together in one story.)
Flinn has friends to join him on his adventure – boys and girls. His version of Narnia is the back of the school art cupboard, which allows them access to a swashbuckling ship, and the dreaded pirate dinosaurs.
Lead baddie is (of course) a T Rex, who is particularly keen on the prospect of eating Flinn and his friends – with ‘much too much tomato ketchup’.
I shall say no more for now, but if you develop a liking for Flinn, there are more adventures to be had. There’s even a stage production too now.
Tinker and Tanker (Richard Scarry)
I can’t tell you how many times we read the Tinker and Tanker pirate story in this collection. But it was A Lot.
I think I can confirm that there is a nice cross-over with the notion of a Trojan Horse, without giving too much away.
Tinker and Tanker are a rabbit and a hippo, respectively, who have lots of adventures in settings like the Wild West, with pirates, building a space ship etc.
We are generally a Richard Scarry appreciating household. This wasn’t one Dan or I had come across before, but it has a particular place in Junior Reader’s affections.
Captain Pugwash books (John Ryan)
Pirates have a particular opportunity to try out the hero / villain / anti-hero options.
But they can of course also choose coward, which is Pugwash’s default (seconded only by ascribing the success of an adventure to himself, rather than the resourceful cabin boy Tom).
Whatever you think you know about the 70s TV series, stop for a minute, and try out the books. They are great. (The link above will show you a whole range of them.)
I say this as someone who could pretty much recite Pugwash and the Sea Monster, verbatim, from my own childhood (and my brother can do similar with Pugwash and the Smugglers).
Many of the shorter ones are versions of the stories covered in the TV series, but look a bit further, and you’ll find longer stories which are done in a more conventional cartoon-style.
Junior Reader is particularly fond of The Quest of the Golden Handshake, with the wonderfully named Chief Hotta Watta Bottle. (This reliably results in fits of laugher from Junior Reader, time after time.)
Jolly Roger and the Pirates of King Abdul (Colin McNaughton)
This is an interesting one – a kind of cross-over between a picture book and a novella. It’s also available in picture book format, and as a short read chapter book.
This is great for rollicking language, with a brilliant backstory about why Roger is really not that jolly – but does become so in time.
It’s another opportunity to see the more bungling versions of pirates, doing their best to be fearsome, but soon at the mercy of someone bossier than them.
Jolly Roger made it into the category of ‘read again immediately’, which is always a good sign. But you might want to have some cough sweets beside you, if you are reading aloud and trying to give different voices to the pirates.
There’s just time to squeeze in one more to take it up to five.
Leading the chase for the best title of today’s post is Margaret Mahy’s The Great Piratical Rumbustification.
(Who could see that on a bookshop shelf and pass by? Clearly not me. I love Mahy; Junior Reader loves pirates. Done deal.)
As well as introducing children to useful words like ‘rumbustification’, this plays to the carousing side of pirates. Imagine that pirates share a common calling to a really big knees-up, every so often, and the scene is set.
Imagine also that the location chosen for the knees-up is a house with fairly strait-laced characters, and you can imagine the impact of one on t’other.
Like other Mahy books I enjoy, there is often a positive rubbing off of traits when two seemingly opposing groups mix, and wonderful vocabulary at work too.
===
I’ll leave it at that for now. There are of course also pirate chapter books (largely responsible for launching Junior Reader’s chapter book habit), pirate reference books, pirate activity books, and so on.
I’m sure a bottle of rum, or a glass of grog, would be just the thing to end the post on, before I seek out my hammock. But perhaps I’ll stick the kettle on instead.