Avast there! As everyone knows—and greedy Captain Purplebeard and his scurvy crew find out, to their cost—no treasure comes without its little hazards. Or big, fatal ones, as the climactic gatefold in this extravagantly illustrated cautionary tale reveals. Lured (literally, as it turns out) by an appropriately loose-jointed fiddler, Purplebeard and his hearties—every gold ring, elaborate tattoo and snaggly brown tooth limned in lapidary detail in Duddle’s digital paintings—eagerly set sail to a doom that, to sharp-eyed observers, is telegraphed from the first page on. As a versifier the author makes a talented visual artist (“THERE IS ONE SMALL THING I FORGOT YESTERDAY— / THERE’S ALSO A MONSTER, OR SO THEY SAY”), but the visual treasure begins on the endpapers, and young lubbers of every stripe will happily climb aboard his lavish, high-style, picture-book debut. (Picture book. 7-9)
