The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones
Written by Will Mabbitt
Illustrated by Ross Collins
Blimey! Don’t pick your nose or you could get captured by pirates! No matter how many times some children are warned, they still do it, Mabel Jones is one guilty girl. One minute she is wearing her pajamas and in her own bedroom. Then silence. Captured and plopped aboard a pirate ship, she is required to help find some missing treasure before the comet flies over if she has any desire of getting back home.
This mismatched batch of pirates are hilarious. First, they are completely disgusted to realize their new crewmate is a girl. Until they realize she can read. Now they know she is brainy and can be of help to them. Even the strange creature who captured her ends up loving her, because she is kind to him.
Everything about this adventure is entertaining and fun. Even the varying sizes of fonts make it a fun read and give the appearance of fewer words than might be expected in this long a book. Good readers will devour this story and reluctant readers will stick with it all the way to the end. Pen and ink sketches help the characters and story come alive, though, the text does that extremely well.
While there are some misspelled words, as one might expect of pirates, the spellings are phonetic so children readers will translate them happily.
Teachers and librarians can introduce this in read aloud form. Literacy skills dealing with fantasy, world building, context clues and character development will all be met within the core curriculum. English teachers can easily use these stories to propel their students’ own writing into the world of the future.
Title: The Unlikely Adventures of Mabel Jones- Author: Will Mabbitt
- Illustrator: Ross Collins
- Publisher: Viking/ Penguin, 2015
- Reviewer: Elizabeth Swartz
- Format: Hardcover, 290 pages
- ISBN: 978-0-451-47196-3
- Genre: Fiction
- Grade level: 3 to 6
