Me pirates STARRRED!

Me pirate book (coming at August's end) has hoisted a starrrred review from the July 15th, 2012 issue of Kirkus Reviews:

SHIVER ME TIMBERS!
Pirate Poems and Paintings
By Douglas Florian (Author) , Robert Neubecker (Illustrator)
Age Range: 4 - 8
(Beach Lane; ISBN: 9781442413214; August 2012; Fall catalog)
Arr! ’Tis a bonny day indeed when piratical inclinations are recorded with such florid nastiness as that found in this stellar collection of seagoing poems for salty dogs. “A pirate’s life is topsy-turvy, / Full of strife, and rife with scurvy.” Don’t believe a word of it. With Florian presenting the true life of pirates, from endless days of seafood (“If we have fish for one more day / Methinks that I will puke”) to general information (“We’re rude, crude dudes with attitudes”), it’s hard to imagine a pirate poetry book half as much fun as the one conjured up here. It helps that along with being amusing, the poems are actually informative as well. Kids learn a variety of terms in “Pirate Patter,” run through a virtual pirate thesaurus (from “buccaneers” to “salt sea-robbers”) in “Names for Pirates,” decipher what symbols mean in “Pirate Flags,” and are instructed in the difference between a privateer and a buccaneer in “Rule of the Pirate.” Bouncy verse is ably complemented by Neubecker’s pitch-perfect art. His nasty (yet nicely multicultural and including both genders) rovers are always dirty, always wild and clearly having fun on every page. It’s not a stretch to say that if Shel Silverstein himself were to have dabbled in the piratical he could not have come up with a better selection of scurvy doggerel than the delicious verses found here.

I'd like to thank me land-locked illustrator Robert (Salty Dog) Neubecker for creating the Arrrrt, and me west coast editor Andrea (Scallywag) Welch of Beach Lane Books for readying me sea legs. A sneak preview possible for Poetry Friday.