The Secret Pirate

The Secret Pirate by Elli Woollard is a rhyming double adventure for 7 year olds about a schoolgirl who is secretly the boldest pirate on the seas.

What happens

Lil sits in class doing spellings and sums like everybody else. Nobody has the faintest idea that at weekends she fights monsters all night in water full of sharks.

Nobody has worked out the talking schoolbag either. (Bags can't talk. Obviously.)

Her teacher Miss Lubber is not a fan of any of this. Mention pirates and Lil gets told that pirates aren't real and please stop telling lies.

Then a drawing of a skull appears on Lil's desk. She knows exactly who put it there.

Stinkbeard is the grottiest villain in the book and quite possibly in any book. He has fleas from his armpits to his knees. There are lice in his toenails. The mould in his beard is thirty years old and crusted with seaweed.

He also intends to kidnap Miss Lubber and demand a ransom, which puts Lil in an awkward spot. It is hard to feel like rescuing a teacher who has just kept you in at playtime for fibbing.

The whole thing is in rhyme and it absolutely gallops. Words stretch out across the page. Capitals shout at you. Half the fun is hearing where the rhyme is heading and getting there a beat before it does.

Your reader will be in on a joke that nobody in the story is. Lil saves the day and gets a detention for her trouble. Then she goes back to her sums while every grown-up carries on knowing nothing.

There's a second story after that one. Sports day, a mayor handing out trophies, and something in the grass by the log that is definitely not a puppy.

It's daft rather than scary. The threats are enormous and ridiculous, the villain gets beaten with flying school dinner, and her parrot Carrot finishes the job with a bite on the bum.

If your reader is only just moving from picture books into chapters, the rhyme carries a lot of the weight here. It still runs long enough to feel like a proper book, which is the nice part.

What to read next

And if a girl with a secret life that nobody believes in sounds right, Princess Mirror-Belle is the one to reach for next. Ellen's own reflection climbs out of the bathroom mirror, announces that she is royalty, and starts telling whoppers that Ellen gets the blame for.