Pirate Girl
Kindergarten-Grade 2–Molly is sailing off to visit her grandmother when she is captured by ferocious Captain Firebeard and his cutthroat crew. Their intention is to hold her for ransom, but the stalwart girl refuses to divulge her parents' names and address despite endless chores and threats of being fed to the sharks. Instead, she waits until the pirates fall asleep and tosses messages tucked into bottles out to sea. Caught in the act, she is about to be thrown overboard when rescue arrives in the person of her mother, the pirate Barbarous Bertha. Firebeard and his crew must now take over Molly's chores, and she sails happily off to Grandma's house. While the plot is mildly amusing, it is also thin and predictable. If the intention was to make a feminist statement, the story falls short of the mark, unless the message is that girls, too, can be nasty bullies. Meyer's cartoon sketches resemble Quentin Blake's work, but some of the details are lost in the odd choice of a murky gray for skin tones. Funke'sThe Princess Knight(Scholastic, 2004) is a better choice for feminist fare, and David McPhail'sEdward and the Pirates(Little, Brown, 1997) is a superior pirate story.–Grace Oliff, Ann Blanche Smith School, Hillsdale, NJCopyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.