From Publishers Weekly
"Yo ho, yo ho, it's off to the bath we go!" shout the titular budding buccaneer brothers. Their mother, no fool, plays right along: "Walk the plank!" she orders her now-naked (except for pirate headgear) charges, pointing to the frothy tub. Working in the thick, color-saturated acrylics of his previous book Baghead, Krosoczka stretches the watery playground across the gutter, and makes the bubbly tub's surface as wavy and wild as the high seas. The bathers themselves embody the snips-and-snails-and-puppy-dog-tails definition of boy, their oversize heads sporting ear-to-ear grins. They jubilantly spout pirate lingo, while their sidekick, a menacing teeth-baring, eye patch-sporting rubber ducky, looks on. A hair wash by the "mommy pirate" doesn't strike the boys as worthy of two hardened sea rovers ("Blimey!" they grimace), but they carry out the rest of their bathing duties with swashbuckling aplomb, then scamper into the kitchen to claim their treasure: ice cream, eaten straight from the container. Ages 2-5.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From School Library Journal
PreSchool-Grade 2-A jolly "pirate mommy" turns bath time into an excursion at sea as mounds of bubbles create a foaming main for her two sons caught up in pirate fantasies. Even their snarly rubber ducky sports a black eye patch, and the only time the boys look downcast is when they remove their headgear for a hair wash. They don't stay clean long, though, because their reward is ice cream scooped straight from cartons. The unvarying call and response of the text becomes tedious, and the vividly colored illustrations include some jarring elements-the people are almost caricatures (their faces are dominated by large mouths with lots of teeth). Still, fans of Krosoczka's Good Night, Monkey Boy (Knopf, 2001) will enjoy this title as a kind of bedtime companion piece, and it may be considered where there is a need for books with this theme. A more sustained, imaginative bath excursion can be found in Jerry Pallotta's Dory Story (Charlesbridge, 2000), and Simon Puttock's Squeaky Clean (Little, Brown, 2002) offers an exuberant and appealing family of pigs enjoying their bath-time bubbles.
Kathy Piehl, Minnesota State University, MankatoCopyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
