The Great Piratical Rumbustification & the Librarian and the Robbers

From School Library Journal Gr 3-6 Available in the U.K. since 1978, this is a well-balanced pair of humorous pieces, one a novella, the other a short story. In The Great Piratical Rumbustification , the boys of the Terrapin family find themselves with a pirate babysitter who wants to use their house for a long-delayed pirate party. In The Librarian and the Robbers , Serena Laburnum, the beautiful librarian, is kidnapped and held for ransom by a gang of ill-read robbers. How she achieves her own rescue, then rescues the Robber Chief, is enough to delight the hearts of young readers and of librarians everywhere. The pirate party, too, is a great success, and not just for the participants. Both stories clamor to be read aloud and will be just the answer to the Friday afternoon doldrums. Blake's illustrations are right in keeping with the general zaniness yet perfect logic of the texts. Barbara Hutcheson, Greater Victoria Public Library, CanadaCopyright 1987 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. Review Two books worth of story crammed into 63 magical pages, full of robbers tricked by librarians and retired pirates who know how to party and revive the joys of boyhood (while paying the bills). No impossibly articulate child protagonists with clearly defined goals or desires, no rhyme or reason, just a pair of stories cut from the same cloth as books by Willaim Stieg and Roald Dahl. --David Elzey, The Excelsior File --This text refers to an alternate