Pirate Stew

October 15, 2020
Preschool-G Mum and Dad are heading out for a night on the town, which can mean only one thing: a babysitter is due at any moment. The kids aren't particularly pleased, but then the caretaker bursts in, and?it's a pirate! Long John McRon, to be specific, and it's not long before an entire pack of pirates joins him at the front door. The motley crew may be scurvy scalawags, but they are responsible scalawags, and they quickly realize that they must provide dinner for their young charges. Scrambled eggs? Too complicated. Spaghetti? Too wormlike. A good, old-fashioned pot of Pirate Stew? That's the ticket! The story is slight but highly enjoyable, with Gaiman's silly, singsong verses the perfect ingredient for a raucous read-aloud. Riddell's predictably fabulous illustrations are ablaze with color and detail, but while he's compiled a diverse cast, the pirates are pure caricature, and some figures pulled from pirate lore?most notably an Asian man?fall into the realm of racial stereotype.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

November 2, 2020
Babysitting two skeptical siblings, Long John McRon, Ship’s Cook, and his pirate crew concoct a buccaneer-pleasing repast: “Pirate Stew, Pirate Stew,/ eat it and you won’t be blue./ You can be a pirate too!” What could possibly go awry? With consummately inventive Newbery Medalist Gaiman at the helm, nothing short of boatloads. In rollicking verse, the rowdy chefs, elaborately costumed and coiffed in Riddell’s freewheeling illustrations, initially toss relatively tame ingredients into their golden cooking pot—“Start with onions, start with carrots./ Add the seeds that feeds the parrots./ Pulverized with heavy pestles, leeks are good (except in vessels)”—but the recipe becomes comically slapdash with the addition of gold doubloons, cannonballs, “a slice of plank for walking,/ and some extra Arrs for talking.” The whimsy takes further flight when Long John McRon pilots a post-supper journey to a doughnut shop after the children’s house morphs into an airborne pirate ship, and the longtime collaborators top off this delightful yarn with a wry parental twist. Ages 4–8.

March 1, 2021

Gr 1-2-Oh, the day you find out your babysitter is a pirate does not bode well. Blonde, blue-eyed mother and Black goatee-sporting father are going out, and Long John McRon, ship's cook, arrives with all the tropes in place, from a peg leg and (literally) a left hook to a blue beard and a crutch. As jolly goes, he's got plenty, as he coaxes his young charges, biracial siblings with black hair and light brown skin, to join him and the hordes he invites in, who resemble all the pirates in fiction, including Captain Hook from Neverland. The siblings feel doomed, and in Riddell's raucous and crowded illustrations, readers will understand what the pair are up against. And for dinner? "Pirate Stew! Pirate Stew! Pirate Stew for me and you!" The hitch is that eating the stew turns one into a pirate, so the siblings opt for specially procured donuts. But when the mother and father come home, a bit peckish? These children are now the happy offspring of "Pirate Mom" and "Pirate Dad." This is royal fun for all, in rhymes that have plenty of openings for chanting along. VERDICT For noisy read-alouds and a punchline kids won't soon forget, this is a picture book to hoist onto every shelf.-Kimberly Olson Fakih, School Library Journal

Copyright 2021 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from October 15, 2020
This book could serve as a recruiting drive for pirates, mostly because of the hair. Pirate hair, in Riddell's illustrations, is glorious. It's powder blue, or it's peaked like twin mountains or forms crests like waves in the ocean. More important, the pirates have joyous, irresistible smiles. But the two children who find themselves babysat by these benign buccaneers are still suspicious. The pirates in this picture book don't follow the rules of ordinary seagoers. When they make their titular stew, the ingredients include "a Jolly Roger" and "half a sack of gold doubloons." If you eat it, they say, "You'll become a pirate too!" The artwork also blithely veers from the text. Gaiman says that the chief pirate has gray hair, but in Riddell's delicately lined cartoons his beard is a bright, cheerful blue, proving that no one should ever trust pirates or artists or children's-book authors. But it's hard to be afraid of buccaneers who shout things like "Toodle-pip!" The crew is diverse enough--in wardrobe and in racial presentation--that almost any reader can feel welcome. The children have brown skin and come from an interracial family, with a White mother and a Black father. The rhythm of the rhyming text is instantly catchy, though it's so dense that a word and its rhyme occasionally become separated when the layout places them on different pages. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.8-by-15-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.) Readers may wish that Talk Like a Pirate Day lasted all year long. (Picture book. 4-9)

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