PIRATEOLOGY

THE BROTHERHOOD OF PIRATES

THE WAVE RUNNERS

PIRATES GALORE

THE WOODEN MILE

GHOST SHIP

THE SHIP BETWEEN THE WORLDS

THE WORLD may be waiting for the latest film in Gore Verbinski’s Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy to come out this month, but children’s publishing is giving no quarter in the piratical market.

Templar’s Pirateology (Templar, £17.99, offer £16.99), adorned with a compass on the cover, and purporting to have been “found in an old sea chest by divers”, follows the usual scrapbook style. Fake newspaper clippings, tickets, logs and journals relate how one William Lubber hunts for “The Terror of the Seas”, Arabella Drummond. There is a cut-out bag of glitter for gold dust along with genuinely useful maps and pirate biographies.

I love these books. They are not just witty ways of stimulating a child’s imagination; they also show them how to present school projects with verve. There are lots of other versions of this, from Doring Kindersley’s more scholarly Pirate-o-pedia, to Terry Deary’s Horrible Histories version, but the unashamedly hammy Ology series wins hands-down.

Another, more recent, recommendation is William Gilkerson’s The Brotherhood of Pirates (Corgi, £5.99, offer £5.69). Having won last year’s Canadian Governor General’s Literary Award for children’s fiction, it should take those of 11+ by storm over here. Modelled on Treasure Island, it is narrated by Jim, a boy trying to help his widowed mother run an embattled hotel on the coast of Nova Scotia. One wild afternoon a ship comes into harbour, bearing a quarantine flag and a mysterious English sailor who knows more about pirates than any man alive.

Interwoven with a lovely plot about how Captain Charles Johnson helps Jim and his mother to defeat the local bad guys is a series of historical tales about pirates. Each story is beautifully paced well-written, thoughtful and clever. Gilk-erson’s familiarity with seamanship (he is the author of ten books on nautical matters) makes it especially enjoyable.

The German author Kai Meyer has gone the whole hog on the supernatural with The Wave Runners (Egmont, £5.99, offer £5.69), for 9+. Jolly and Munk are the last polliwiggles – children who can walk on water as easily as on land – and the novel gets off to a terrific start, with Jolly washed up on an island farmed largely by ghosts. She soon encounters not only Munk but the mysterious Ghost Trader, the dog-headed Buenadventure and a pirate princess. Unfortunately, it goes overboard, as supernatural events pile up. Verbinski’s monstrous Kraken looks like a model of restraint by comparison.

Sid Fleischman is a Newberry Medal winner, and Pirates Galore (Catnip, £5.99, offer £5.69) tells how a 12-year-old boy, plucked from a shipwreck, is rescued by a notorious pirate. With its short chapters and cloth-eared clichés it might keep readers of 7+ entertained, but Chris Mould’s The Wooden Mile (Hodder, £6.99, offer £6.64) is much funnier. Stanley is on holiday when his Great Uncle Bart’s crimes catch up in the shape of a stolen amulet. Evil pirates want to find it, and Stanley has to outwit them and find the amulet himself. The stakes aren’t high enough in the plot, but the confidence and charm of the drawings make up for this.

Dietlof Reiche’s Ghost Ship (Chicken House, £5.99, offer £5.69) also blends piracy and ghost story in its tale of a teenage waitress who finds out why the bay where she works goes suddenly dry. Conveniently discovering a journal kept by an ancestor on the ill-starred vessel Storm Goddess, Vicki is drawn into a curse in which the crew must repeat their fights again and again.

Julia Golding seems to be turning out a children’s book every three months, and here is The Ship Between the Worlds (OUP, £5.99, offer £5.69). Its hero, David, is being bullied by a gang while his mother struggles to cope with his father’s mysterious disappearance. Lying sleepless, he is pressganged by pirates who hold the key to his father’s fate.

I particularly liked the way that David, after all his trials in the Seas In-Between, returns to our world with the strength and speed to beat the bullies gained by hours of deck-scrubbing and climbing the rigging. There’s no doubting Golding’s energy and talent, but less haste could have given a deeper, richer texture to the prose and to the characters.

Readers should pick carefully among the pirate books waiting to ride the tide: although some are treasures, not all are laden with pieces of eight.

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