Review by Booklist Review
Arrgh, matey, best beware! Pirates take the stage in Florian's latest book of short, rhymed verse. Delighting in the colorful vocabulary of pirate lore and the popular image of piracy, these 19 poems focus on topics such as the code of conduct, food, and weapons of piracy. While history plays a role, the book's overall tone is comical, with an outlook summed up in pithy, playful lines such as We're rude, crude dudes with attitudes. / We're motley and we're mean, and A pirate's life is topsy-turvy, / Full of strife and rife with scurvy. Bold ink drawings, digitally brightened with colors, capture the tone of the writing and add their own witty details. With deft wordplay in the verse and droll comedy in the art, the book is fun to read aloud. Despite a good bit of sword waving and some sticking out of tongues, there's no more violence here than in a production of The Pirates of Penzance.--Phelan, Carolyn Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In a series of surly pirate-themed poems, Florian (Poem Runs: Baseball Poems) describe the pleasures of life on the high seas-avoiding bathing, pillaging towns, and burying treasure-with swashbuckler slang sprinkled throughout: "Some pirates pirate spices./ They steal without a care./ Some pirates pirate pirates-/ Arrgh, matey, best beware!" It's not all the good life, though, with meals leaving something to be desired ("One Friday we had flounder./ Saturday ate fluke./ If we have fish for one more day/ Methinks that I will puke," complains one scallywag). Florian tosses some unexpected ingredients into the chowder: fearsome Blackbeard diligently writes letters to his mum (she resembles her son, beard and all); on another spread, modern-day children examine the sand where, just below, a skeletal Captain Kidd still guards his treasure ("Been buried here/ Fer many a year/ Since 1669"). With their bloodshot eyes and yellowed teeth, Neubecker's caricatured pirates are appropriately rowdy, rambunctious, and rough around the edges (you can practically smell their feet), the humor complementing the playful say-it-with-a-snarl verse. Ages 6-up. Illustrator's agent: Linda Pratt, Wernick & Pratt. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 2-5-From the smiling, rollicking kids on the cover laying claim to a beach full of treasure to the shipload of fierce, sneering, plundering, cutlass-waving, face-making buccaneers, boastful of their scurrilous behavior, these pirates are a motley group. In 19 poems, they teach "Pirate Patter" and punishment and describe some less-than-appetizing meals at sea; their penchant for stealing, burying, and sometimes losing track of treasure; and their weapons. To hear them tell it, they're "...rude, crude dudes with attitudes" who practice growling-"Arrr!"-and ".love to try to make you cry." "A pirate's life is not for me!" says the young bloke rowing away from the ship under a starry sky. The up- and downsides of life on a pirate ship are evident in Neubecker's bold, colorful, detail-filled cartoonlike illustrations, outlined in India ink. Kids, boys especially, will be charmed by these feisty poems.-Susan Scheps, formerly at Shaker Heights Public Library, OH (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Florian provides young pirate lovers with a profusion of arrrghs and ahoy mateys, enough to keep their piratephilia alive for a long time. Using stereotypical pirate-speak, each poem explores a familiar aspect of pirate lore and takes it to a new level of rhythm and rhyme, usually with a final line calculated to evoke a chuckle. In "Pirates Wear Patches," rhyming couplets list pirate clothing and accessories, from patches to puffy shirts to tricorne hats. The final stanza reads, "Pirates have parrots / And eat alligator. / Pirates shoot first / And then ask questions later." Sometimes the poems veer into the deliciously disgusting. "Pirates Meal" ends with the crowd-pleasing line, "Methinks that I will puke." Neubeckers digitally colored India-ink illustrations play well with the light verse. While some of the images feature close-ups of faces, many of a pirate (or just his bloodshot eyes on a black background) staring directly at the reader, there is nothing to be afraid of here, and the reader knows that these poems are balanced between light gore and outright silliness. robin l. smith (c) Copyright 2012. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Arr! 'Tis a bonny day indeed when piratical inclinations are recorded with such florid nastiness as that found in this stellar collection of seagoing poems for salty dogs. "A pirate's life is topsy-turvy, / Full of strife, and rife with scurvy." Don't believe a word of it. With Florian presenting the true life of pirates, from endless days of seafood ("If we have fish for one more day / Methinks that I will puke") to general information ("We're rude, crude dudes with attitudes"), it's hard to imagine a pirate poetry book half as much fun as the one conjured up here. It helps that along with being amusing, the poems are actually informative as well. Kids learn a variety of terms in "Pirate Patter," run through a virtual pirate thesaurus (from "buccaneers" to "salt sea-robbers") in "Names for Pirates," decipher what symbols mean in "Pirate Flags," and are instructed in the difference between a privateer and a buccaneer in "Rule of the Pirate." Bouncy verse is ably complemented by Neubecker's pitch-perfect art. His nasty (yet nicely multicultural and including both genders) rovers are always dirty, always wild and clearly having fun on every page. It's not a stretch to say that if Shel Silverstein himself were to have dabbled in the piratical he could not have come up with a better selection of scurvy doggerel than the delicious verses found here. (Picture book/poetry. 4-8)]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
