Review by Booklist Review
Disaster! A passing storm scatters a pirate skeleton's bones across the ocean, and he must begin the arduous task of hunting them down. At first, he's just a skull rolling across the ocean floor, bemoaning his situation and begging each passing fish for help: ""Now I need my gnaw bone / my chicken-chomping saw bone. / I'll starve without my jawbone / I miss my mandible!"" Piece by piece (and skeletal vocab word by word) he rebuilds himself with the aid of marine wildlife (though some of the aquatic critters are more helpful than others). But once his body, peg-leg and all, is rebuilt, our hero has one thing left to find. This clever, cumulative tale is enhanced by its endpapers, which feature scattered labelled bones at the front and a full skeleton at the back, and playful, dimly lit underwater digital illustrations populated by bug-eyed, curious fish. The rhyme keeps things moving despite the hefty vocabulary (Metacarpals! Phalanges!) and the illustrations make it clear what everything is. Somehow daffy and scholarly at once.--Maggie Reagan Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Horn Book Review
A pirate skeleton, upon finding its bones have been scattered in the sea, implores readers, in jaunty rhyme, to assist in putting itself back together: Help me find my head bone, / my pillowed-on-the-bed bone, / the pirates flag-of-dread bone / Im scouting out my skull. The text is both funny and informative regarding human anatomyWho can spot my shoulder blade / Oh, scapula, come back!with clearly labeled diagrams at the beginning and end. Its a little morbid, but Kolars digital undersea illustrations are friendly, cartoony, and understated, with humerus, er, humorous details (i.e., a squid making off with the pirates radius, ulna, and belt) that are all about silliness. elissa Gershowitz September/October 2019 p.52(c) Copyright 2019. 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
In a watery anatomy lesson, a pirate skeleton gathers up and reconnects its scattered bones.As it goes, Norman's rollicking rhymes cleverly incorporate each major bone's common and formal names: "Collar me a collarbone, / the way-down-where-I-swaller bone, / a handy parrot-hauler bone / I claim my clavicle." She tracks her skeletal buccaneer's sandy-bottom reassembly from skull to "fair phalanges." Sandwiched between visual keys on the endpapers (in separate pieces in the front and assembled and accoutered in the rear), Kolar scatters simplified but recognizable body parts (plus the requisite peg leg) across sea beds well-populated with colorful tropical fish and other marine denizens. Several of these pitch in to help before the narrative leaves the finished skeleton posing heroically atop a sunken ship with a spyglass clutched in its metacarpals: "There's treasure to be found here / I feel it in my bones!" Budding biologists as well as general fans of pirates, poetry, and wordplay will agreeand it makes a fuller (and less freighted) alternative to Bob Barner's Dem Bones (1996) and other versions of the old teaching spiritual.Both macabre and cheerya rare treat. (Picture book. 6-8) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
