Pirates – Literary Features Syndicate

Text © 2015 Peter Bently, Images ©2015 Helen Oxenbury. Reproduced with permission from Dial Books.

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Adventures on the High Seas of Make-Believe

Captain Jack and the Pirates, by Peter Bently, illustrated by Helen Oxenbury; Dial Books, $17.99, 32 pages, ages 2-5.

Masters of nursery-school storytelling Peter Bently and Helen Oxenbury have teamed up to create this charming pirate tale set on the high seas of childhood imagination. Jack, Zack, and Caspar (who first appeared in King Jack and the Dragon) are at the beach, building a sandy galleon ready to ferry the boys on a swashbuckling adventure involving treasure and other (slightly parental-looking) pirates. Bently’s prose bobs with gentle rhymes peppered with nautical vocabulary like mainsail and bosun, while Oxenbury’s trademark illustrations bear her singular touch: here, cherubic youngsters revel in the timeless pleasures of make-believe. A delight from stem to stern, Captain Jack and the Pirates is a likely contender to join the pantheon of beloved children’s books.

‘One more step, Mr. Hands,’ said I, ‘and I’ll blow your brains out!’ Image from The Folio Society’s Treasure Island, illustrated by Sterling Hundley. Reproduced with permission.

IN THE NEWS: Congratulations to Sterling Hundley, the overall winner of the V&A Illustration Awards. Hundely took home the award for best book
illustration for his artwork in the Folio Society’s edition of Treasure Island. Judges described his work as “richly coloured, atmospheric and stylistically consistent’,‘appropriately sinister’ and‘bold, brave and powerful”. (Read the entire press release here.) The awards ceremony took place on May 18 at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Learn more about this American artist and his method – my profile on Hundely, appeared on the Fine Books & Collections Blog in January.

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