April is the right month for Dark Cloud Strong Breeze. April is the month for rain and wind. Susan Patron wrote the verses, and Peter Catalanotto painted the pictures in this children’s book from Pine Bush Area Public Library. Put on your raincoat, before you turn the pages. You’re going to get wet.

Daddy has locked his keys in the car, and there is a storm coming on. The background of the pictures is in black, white, gray and tan, and shows the line of businesses, including a drycleaners where Daddy and the little girl have been. Next are paint and wallpaper, the market and the important locksmith. Why Daddy does not go to the locksmith and offer to pay, I do not know. It is the little girl, in a red raincoat, who has to open negotiations.

Will the locksmith help her? “Yes, says Locksmith, clicka-me clong/ If you get a guard, both brave and strong.” Meanwhile, there is a German shepherd, getting into the neighbor’s garbage can. Dog will help if the girl provides a “shelter, dry and warm.” She goes to the market to get boxes to make a shelter, and asks help from the grocer who is having a mouse problem. She talks to a cat, and then a butterfly, and the only one who does not ask for something is the butterfly. The center of each picture, including the dancing butterfly, is in color. Then the rain comes down.

Everybody gets what they bargained for, grocer, cat, dog and locksmith, who ends up with the German shepherd guarding his store. The locksmith helps out, and “The car gets unlocked, jangle-me jome/ The car gets unlocked, and we drive home.” Just when you think it’s happily ever after, “Dark cloud strong breeze/Oops! Daddy’s looking for his other keys.”

Our girl is on top of the problem, because she has a house key on a string around her neck. Her father would really be in trouble without her! So read this dancing poem with pictures, and get out your umbrella.

Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! There are several books about pirates in the Adult Services non-fiction section of the Pine Bush Area Library. The more I read of David Cordingly’s book, the more I want to read. Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates flows right along. David Cordingly worked at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England for twelve years. He organized the exhibition, “Pirates: Fact and Fiction” which was terribly popular.

Cordingly’s first chapter is “Wooden Legs and Parrots.” He talks about R.L. Stevenson’s most famous book. “The effect of Treasure Island on our perception of pirates cannot be overestimated. Stevenson linked pirates forever with maps, schooners, tropical islands and one-legged seamen with parrots on their shoulders.”

The reality is not as much fun. In “Plundering the Treasure Forts” find “…the bands of privateers and adventurers who came to be known as the buccaneers. Driven out of their inland hunting grounds on Hispaniola by Spanish soldiers, the uncouth men who lived there… migrated to the north coast of Hispaniola. There they were joined by a mixed bunch of runaway slaves, deserters, escaped criminals, and religious refugees.”

Blackbeard, Captain Kidd, Henry Morgan, Calico Jack and the horrible Bartholomew Roberts and others are found throughout the book, and some have chapters all their own. Anne Bonny and Mary Read, and the Irish Grace O’Malley are written about in “Women Pirates and Pirates’ Women.” That chapter also talks about “the Chinese pirate Mrs. Cheng, whose fleets of ships ruled the South China Sea in the early years of the nineteenth century.” There’s more here than I expected.

Other chapters include “Into Action Under the Pirate Flag,” “Storms, Shipwrecks and Life at Sea,” “Pirate Islands and Other Haunts” and the gruesome “Torture, Violence and Marooning.” I could not finish that chapter. Eventually it comes to “Hunting Down the Pirates” and it grinds to a halt. It isn’t pretty and it isn’t fun.

David Cordingly writes in his “Afterword” that “The fact is that we want to believe in the world of the pirates as it has been portrayed in the adventure stories, the plays and the films over the years. We want the myths, the treasure maps, the buried treasure, the walking the plank, the resolute pirate captains with their cutlasses and earrings, and the seamen with their wooden legs and parrots. We prefer to forget…the desperate plight of men shipwrecked on hostile coasts. For most of us the pirates will always be romantic outlaws living far from civilization on some distant sunny shore.”

Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum! Drink and the devil have done for the rest. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!