The Indoor Pirates on Treasure Island

The Indoor Pirates on Treasure Island by Jeremy Strong is a very daft comedy for 8 year olds about five pirates who can't stand the sea.

What happens

They don't like it because it's wet. They don't like rain either, for the same reason. And baths are the worst, because baths are very, VERY wet.

So they live in a house. Number 25, Dolphin Street. No stairs, just rope rigging. Blue walls with fluffy clouds painted on and plastic seagulls dangling off the ceilings.

Captain Blackpatch is in charge. Thin pointy beard, thin pointy moustache, thin pointy nose. His black patch is stitched onto a torn sleeve rather than worn over an eye, which tells you most of what you need to know about the man.

He barks orders in his best captain voice, then sneaks off for a nap while everyone else does the work.

The rest of the crew are every bit as good. Bald Ben can lift an armchair with one arm and has I LOVE MUM tattooed on his head underneath a red rose. Lumpy Lawson does the cooking, badly, and yells "jigglepoops!" whenever something upsets him.

Then there are the twins, Molly and Polly, who will argue about absolutely anything. One says she can run faster. The other says she can run slower. And off they go.

Things kick off properly when Blackpatch waits an hour for a bus in the rain and comes home dripping onto the hall floor. Right, he announces. He's learning to drive.

They buy a battered red truck. He won't take it until the garage man paints a skull and crossbones on both doors and flies a Jolly Roger from the aerial. He also demands an anchor, so he can make it stop.

You can probably guess how the first lesson goes. (The anchor is bolted to the back bumper. The bumper does not survive the experience.)

After that comes a camping trip, an island, and a captain who gets it into his head that there's treasure under it somewhere.

It's the kind of book where whoever is telling it keeps butting in to explain the joke he's just made, or to correct himself. That's most of the charm. It reads aloud brilliantly and it's stuffed with the sort of repetition children ask you to do again.

Nothing here is frightening. The worst of it is a crashed truck, some bruises and one badly shaken driving instructor, and all the sword-waving is done with a wooden one.

What to read next

There is a second crew in the library who also never go anywhere near the sea. The Great Cheese Robbery has a pirate gang two inches tall living in a ship in a bottle in a junk shop, and their captain takes his naps on an open copy of Treasure Island.