PAPA IS A PIRATE

Scoffing delightedly, a lad eagerly listens to his father’s admission that, instead of going to an office every day, he heads down to the harbor to captain the pirate ship Lolly Golly through seas rough and smooth. “But, Papa,” he protests, “you don’t have a pirate beard...And besides, you don’t have a wooden leg.” “A wooden leg is a nuisance,” Papa parries. “Only pirates on TV have wooden legs.” Featuring unusually expressive figures, Grossman-Hensel’s canvas-textured cartoons add amusing detail to Papa’s nautical yarns, highlighted by a scene in which he meets Mama, who is also a pirate—stranded on a tropical island and “in a mighty bad mood.” Reminiscent of Linda Heller’s Castle on Hester Street (reissued in 2007, with new illustrations by Boris Kulikov) for its flights of fancy and happily intimate intergenerational give and take, this should be a popular choice for parent-child sharing. Young audiences will definitely respond to the author’s closing suggestion that their own papas may be seafarers too. (Picture book. 5-8)