The Adventures of Jack Scratch: The Quest for the Hiss-paniola! - Hardcover

Phillips, Craig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0473452154 ISBN 13: 9780473452155

Publisher: Wildling Books, 2018

Synopsis

PIRATES! CURSES! CUTLASSES!
Meet Jack Scratch. Pint sized hero. Swashbuckler. Adventurer... and singer of pirate ditties!
Together with Cap'n Catnip - The World's Greatest Mariner - and his Uncle Silver, Jack is about to embark on a quest to find the fabled treasure of the Hiss-paniola!
And he'll encounter a whole lot of trouble along the way.

Written and illustrated by Craig Phillips, this is the first in The Adventures of Jack Scratch series of comics about a pirate cat. Craig is bringing the love of comics back to a new generation of children. Recommended for all little adventurers.

Several years ago Craig's daughter asked him to make a book just for her. When he asked her what she'd like it to be about she said "cats!," then "pirates!" and then, "pirate-cats!" and so Jack Scratch was born and developed over many meal times and deep discussions about all the types of things pirate-cats might get up to.

So, if you have a child that likes cats or pirates or pirate-cats, then they will love this book!

This is the first book in the series and helps to establish some of the main characters that will carry through in the following books. The second book 'The Curse of the Kraken!' is already well under way.

A beautifully illustrated hard cover book.

About this title

Review:

"The Adventures of Jack Scratch: the Quest for the Hiss-Paniola by Craig Phillips, Wildling Books

Last things first - this is hopefully the first book in a series, with the next one being advertised as The Curse of the Kraken. I hope sales of this go well and we can all get hold of the second one in the series. It's a graphic novel, in that it's a story told in comic-strip pictures. But with its impressive size and hardback format it can certainly hold its own with other good-looking books. I can see it in the Sophisticated Picture Books collection in libraries.

Using classic and expert comic-strip features, the story focuses on an open, honest, positive cat called Jack Scratch who ends up involved in a complicated and dangerous quest for treasure. The other characters in the quest (mostly cats) are swashbuckling pirates in the true sense of the word. There's Billy Fishbones, and a mysterious mariner called Catnip, and Tom Silver the cook, and Paw the female pirate, and we mustn't forget the skeleton of Captain Blackclaw... The superb comic-strip pictures are an absolute delight to read and study, full of action and humour and spooky happenings. My eight-year-old grandson will love it to death, but will have to fend off the demands of his brothers.

The author/illustrator is an award-winning professional artist living near Lake Taupo. He has created many book covers for popular children's and young adults' books, as well as rock posters for several well-known bands. His most recent success is winning the Russell Clark Award in this year's NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults for his anthology of fairy tales called Giants, Trolls, Witches, Beasts: Ten Tales From the Deep Dark Woods.

This is an excellent gift for boys (and some girls) of primary and intermediate age, and it will surely become one of the most popular books in your primary and intermediate school libraries. Buy it!"

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Reviewed by Lorraine Orman, Kids Books NZ

About this edition

• Publisher: Wildling Books
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0473452154
• ISBN 13: 9780473452155
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 56
• Illustrator: Phillips Craig