Mateys, you’d best brush up on your Pirate vocabulary before tearing into this one. Terrific practice for Talk Like a Pirate Day, The Curse of Snake Island is peppered with ahoys, avasts, scallywags and the like. Keep this website handy for translating.
This tale is an easy chapter book about some children who are aboard a pirate ship learning to become pirates. Their main duty seems to be swabbing the deck but they long for really pirate adventure. To impress the captain and gain credibility, they swipe and copy a treasure map, answer a tricky riddle and save their ship’s crew from disaster. Not too bad for a day’s work. With illustrations every few pages, this is a good choice for aspiring pirates who are just ready for chapter books. There are both male and female pirates (although I’d argue there’s not a huge differentiation between characters on the whole, with the exception of one prissy little girl who is very clever). The plot is simple and not really inspired, but it’s a very short little chapter book, so it’s main purpose is delivering some piratey goodness to early readers, and that it accomplishes. This is the first in a series.
Great for: Pirate vocabulary abounds. Also points for having pirates in training from both genders.
Sex, Nudity, Dating – None.
Profanity – None.
Death, Violence and Gore – None.
Drugs, Alcohol and Smoking – None.
Frightening or Intense Things – Some people are turned into snakes, someone falls into fish guts. Overall, nothing is too scary in this book, not even the pirates.
