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Jim Ladd's Space Pirates: Stowaway is a silly, fast space adventure for 9 year olds about a boy who hides in a crate of stinking alien eggs to get aboard a pirate ship.
Sam Starbuck lives on the most boring planet in the galaxy. It's a lump of blue rock with his parents' lab on one side and Pirate Port on the other, and he's banned from Pirate Port.
Then his parents' homing beacon crash-lands in the garden. Inside is a scrap of spacesuit with a map drawn on it. They're stuck on Planet X, a world of solid gold that pirates have been hunting for hundreds of years.
No rescue team and no signal. So Sam does the only thing he can think of. He goes to find a pirate.
The pirate he gets is Captain Comet of the Jolly Apollo. He has three eyes, two eye patches, enormous frilly cuffs and a rusty wreck of a ship. He's also a bit of a coward (the terrifying Black-Hole Beard slices through his belt in front of everyone and down come his trousers). Comet doesn't take passengers. So Sam climbs into a crate of glugspawn and stows away.
The crew are a brilliant bunch. There's a two-headed first mate whose heads argue with each other, a Kraken cook who can't keep a secret, and a jelly pirate who leaves a slimy trail. They squabble constantly and love bowling more than anything.
The jokes come thick and fast. Grum, the pirates' famous drink, turns out to be lemonade milkshake. Breakfast is grey sludge with a weevil worm in it. When Sam asks what happened to the last cabin boy, the answer is that he's "permanently indisposed". Black-Hole Beard's parrot even sings rude rhymes about the Jolly Apollo!
Underneath it all, Sam's parents really are lost. There's a proper race against Black-Hole Beard to find them, and it keeps the pages turning.
If you've got a reader who likes their adventures loud, gross and ridiculous, they'll have a great time.
If this one goes down well, they might also like The Indoor Pirates. Captain Blackpatch and his crew hate the sea so much they've moved into a house on Dolphin Street, with rope rigging where the stairs used to be.
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