Media Macaroni

One of the lovely side-effects of having a pirate birthday party in a bookstore is that Olive pulled in quite the booty of wonderful pirate books. She received Pirate Girl by Cornelia Funke, illustrated by Kerstin Meyer, the same book I had selected for the read-aloud part of the party. 

As in her book, The Princess Knight, Cornelia Funke has created an awesome girl-power book in a boy-centric genre. The dreaded Captain Firebeard messes with the wrong little girl when he takes Molly prisoner. Wanting to fetch a ransom from her parents, he demand’s Molly’s address. When she won’t talk, he makes her work the deck until her body aches. Meanwhile, she sends secret messages to her family in bottles on the ocean. I won’t spoil the ending, but Captain Firebeard was none-too-happy to meet up with Molly’s family. 

She also got Dirty Joe, the Pirate by Bill Harley, illustrated by Jack E. Davis, another pirate book with some girl pirate action. Dirty Joe likes to pillage dirty socks and hang his smelly treasure like 500 little flags on his ship. But one day he meets his match when he comes across the ship of Stinky Annie.

“It’s Stinky Annie,” someone said, “and her band of smelly varmints.

She captures every boat she can and takes their undergarments.”

“Then all is lost,” another said. “We haven’t got a chance.

you can’t be a pirate if you don’t have underpants.”

Dirty Joe and Stinky Annie soon discover that they have more in common than just an affinity for dirty laundry, but that too is an ending I shall not spoil. 

Olive also added to her I Spy collection with I Spy Treasure Hunt. I might be biased because I’ve produced I Spy software, but I think these books are amazing. Treasure Hunt is one of the best, with gorgeous sets of seaside town, Smuggler’s Cove. Also, friends of mine made the CD-ROM based on this book, and it’s truly a remarkable game that I highly recommend.

Thanks for the books, everybody!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009 at 9:17 am and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.