How I Became a Pirate

by Melinda Long

[Jane]

Hate to spoil all the fun, but How I Became a Pirate romanticizes child abduction. The illustrations are uniquely creative, memorable and fun, but the underlining romanticization of kidnapping hits me personally.

In middle school, a classmate was abducted by a man and returned a year later because that man was "done" with him, because the classmate was no longer "an innocent boy".

In high school, a student I didn't know but had heard about went missing -- and that story has since died with my vague memory; I don't know what happened.

In recent years, a child was abducted and later found murdered.

When I was in grade school, my mother took my brother and I to the zoo, my brother in one of those folding strollers -- the safety of which is now considered controversial. We'd gone with family and friends, and stopped for a break. My mother turned her head away and I went to the cooler to get a drink. A stranger walked up and started pushing the stroller with my baby brother in it, as if nothing was amiss. I asked my mom -- rather loudly, because I was alarmed -- who was taking him away, and the strange woman released the stroller and walked off as if nothing happened when my mom's undivided attention went to him.

All reviews are considered personal, despite the vast amount of scams on the internet, but I consider reviews pertaining to stories to be the utmost personal. Books and film, and all that which tells a story, affects us based on our collective life experience. Thusly, I cannot in good conscience review this highly, pretending as though the romanticization is not problematic in a society wherein children are often reprimanded for not respecting every adult they come in contact with. I've seen too much darkness in the world to claim blissful ignorance about the goings-on. Ergo, even though it is meant to be a cute children's story, the dangers in society have evolved too much since 2003 for this underlying theme to go ignored.

The Amber Alert was not used nationally -- that is, across all 50 states -- until 2005.

Scenes explicitly illustrating child abduction:
- Boy tries to tell his parents about approaching pirates
- Pirates see boy's sandcastle and compliment him by saying they need good diggers like him so they can dig up treasures
- At night, the pirates refuse to care for the boy in a nurturing way

The problems I have with the story is that a) the boy presumes his parents will be okay if he goes with the pirates and b) no one gets in trouble at the end of the book; nothing's amiss.

Couple this with the conditioning of children who feel they can't say no to adults, regardless of relation, and must heed everything adults tell them, and you've disaster dangling on a string in front of them, like designer handbags to London Tipton.