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Will Mabbitt's The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones is a gloriously silly pirate story for 9 year olds that begins with a girl eating a bogey.
Yes, really. Mabel picks her nose and eats it, with no idea she's being watched through a telescope from another world. On board the Feroshus Maggot, a ship full of pirates, that's known as THE DEED. Anyone who does it is a pirate in the making.
So that night a silent loris creeps into her bedroom with a specially made child-sized sack. By morning Mabel is out at sea in her pyjamas, surrounded by a crew of animal pirates. The captain is a one-eyed wolf called Idryss Ebenezer Split, who has a leg made from a human bone and is NOT pleased to discover she's a girl.
Her only way home is to help Split collect the five lost pieces of a magic X before a comet crosses the sky. (Who knew being able to read and spell could get you out of walking the plank?)
The best bit is the narrator, who keeps stopping the story to chat to your reader. He gives them a tour below deck, offers them a ship's biscuit (those aren't currants) and tells them to peek through their fingers when things get nasty. It's like having a mischievous grown-up reading along beside you.
It's also very, very gross. There's farting in the hammocks, a drink brewed from cat pee and a crocodile surgeon who swaps a septic paw for a doorknob with the help of a meat cleaver. It's all played for laughs and nothing lingers, but a squeamish reader might want to know that before lights out!
Mabel herself is brilliant. She's brave (mostly), a bit cheeky and never lets being small stop her. She even wins a drinking contest against a huge bear by choosing milk.
For a child who likes their heroes plucky and their jokes disgusting, she's perfect.
If they're after another kid who falls in with a ridiculous pirate crew, try Space Pirates: Stowaway. Sam is stuck on the most boring planet in the galaxy, until a pirate galleon with cannons and a plank comes roaring in to land.
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