Pirate Santa

Pirate Santa by Clay Clement / Mark Summers
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Well...the illustrations are nice.... The story, though, is puzzling at best. Santa doesn't, of course, deliver toys to misbehaving children, such as Ninja Boy and Pirate Girl (whose crime is being on a pirate ship??), so his cousin Pirate Cap'n Slappy gets really angry and decides to pick up shipwrecked toys from a mermaid and deliver them with the aid of magical dust stolen from Santa and sprinkled on talking sharks who want to be part of the crew. Which turns out to be Santa's plan all along.

Huh?

I just don't even know what to say about this strange story. It tries to have a moral to the story (i.e. all children deserve toys), but the message is so mixed and bizarre that I got to the end thinking, "What the heck?" Doesn't help matters that the text is intended to be read aloud in a rhythmic sing-song, but the meter isn't consistent, so the flow trips and stutters all over the place. A good editor should have caught those errors and insisted on revisions.

I am thankful to NetGalley and the author/publisher for allowing me to view the eGalley copy.

Oh, and one interesting thing is that the authors are apparently the originators of Talk Like a Pirate Day, which I think is awesome!

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