Grandma And The Pirates

Grandma and the pirates

When pirates, attracted by the smell of home-cooked noodle pudding, abduct Grandma and her parrot, clever Melissa comes up with a plot to set Grandma free. From School Library Journal Grade 1-3-- The scent of Grandma's cooking draws three hungry pirates to her seaside home. After devouring fresh noodle pudding, they stuff all the cupboard contents, Grandma, and her parrot into a sack and row back to their ship. Granddaughter Melissa arrives too late to intervene, but swims out to the pirate ship after dark, where the wakeful "Boss Pirate" captures her, too. Several attempts to escape fail, until finally Melissa tricks the pirates into disembarking on a treasure hunt and sails off without them. The bumpy narrative sags in the middle, the story ends abruptly, and the events and motives do not occur according to a convincing inner logic. Bearing out the heavily antic mode are ambitious pictures, elaborately bordered and saturated with details, color, and commotion, which combine realistic settings with caricatured figures, especially in the pirates' forms. Those children who favor the noisy school of Robert Munsch's stories or Steven Kellogg's illustrations may find the pirates' behavior and the concept of food as plunder amusing the first time around, but the whole is neither as tight nor as childlike as James Young's Penelope and the Pirates (Arcade, 1990). --Karen Litton, London Public Libraries, Ontario, CanadaCopyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.