No Pirates Allowed! Said Library Lou

At Seabreezy Library, things were just right. / Booklovers were cozy. The sky was blue-bright / when--Shiver me timbers!--through Seabreezy's door / stormed big Pirate Pete and his parrot, Igor! Argh!! Things are looking--and smelling!!--a little fishy at Seabreezy Library. When the big X on Pirate Pete's treasure map leads him and his parrot-sidekick Igor to believe buried treasure is hidden at the library, the patrons are quaking in their shoes. But never fear! Library Lou, Seabreezy's librarian-extraordinaire, is as cool as a cucumber and knows how to handle an irate pirate or two. She knows exactly where the treasure is buried. But first she needs to help Pirate Pete and Igor get a handle on their hygiene, brush up on library etiquette, and then tackle learning their letters. And that will lead them to the treasure that can always be found at the library.

2016 Kansas Reading Association’s Bill Martin, Jr. Picture Book Award, Short-listed, 2016

2014 Story Telling World Resource Award - Pre-Adolescent Listeners, Commended, 2014

2014-2105 Florida Reading Association's Children's Book Award Children's Choice, Short-listed, 2014

2014 IRA/CBC Children's Choices List, Winner, 2014

2014 Bank Street Best Books of the Year for Children, Winner, 2014

Creative Child Award Preferred Choice Award, Winner, 2013

School Library Journal

Big Pirate Pete and his parrot, Igor, loudly find their way into the local library where their map indicates a buried treasure. Library Lou, the quick-witted librarian, requests that Pete shower, change clothes, and come back quietly the next day. She teaches Pete about the 25 letters besides the “X” and shows him how they work together to form words. Pete finds his treasure in books by Dr. Seuss, Mother Goose collections, and Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” series. He discovers classics like Treasure Island as well as the nonfiction section. After becoming a voracious reader, he returns to the library to thank Lou for helping him discover the riches of reading. Lou hangs a sign on the library door that says, “Pirates Allowed.” Detailed color cartoon illustrations of characters and settings in sharp contrast lend themselves to conversations about strong character types and reading anywhere (including on a pile of rocks surrounded by seagulls). Rhyming text and steady pacing make this book a good read-aloud for Talk Like a Pirate Day or National Library Week.

Kirkus Reviews

A librarian endows a treasure-hunting pirate with reading skills as well as training him to hush up in this bland valentine to literacy.

Sending other users fleeing from their computer screens and cozy reading nooks to cower in the stacks, Big Pirate Pete bursts into the Seabreezy Library bellowing demands for treasure. Flashing the fierce, quelling glare that good public and school librarians everywhere wield, diminutive Library Lou shuts him up and sends him away with a promise to help after he bathes and changes his undershorts. When he meekly returns, she shows him that there’s more to the alphabet than “X marks the spot,” and in time, he becomes an avid reader—as Greene puts it in a typically lumbering couplet: “Those factual books, Big Pete came to love. / He read about things that he’d never heard of….” Ajhar tracks the development of this Common Core–friendly reading preference in comical scenes in which schoolmarmish Lou dances balletically among piles of books as the exaggeratedly humongous pirate grows more and more absorbed in his reading. At last he figures out that reading is fun and tenders his thanks: “ ‘ ’Cause of ye, now we know—books be the treasure!’ / ‘Shucks,’ whispered Lou. ‘It’s been my pleasure.’ ”

Worthy, even trendy, but unlikely to make nonreaders (of any age) follow the animals in Judy Sierra and Marc Brown’s classic to become Wild About Books (2004). (Picture book. 6-8)