I am originally from Queensland, Australia where I grew up going to the beach and swimming in the sea every week-end. My holidays were always at the sea-side and the sea and the beach were the only things I missed about my homeland when I left to live in Brunei after marriage.

My children didn't know the sea, didn't know how to surf and this book captured everything I felt and knew about the sea and its magic.............the poetic imagery excited the curiosity of both my son and daughter .For the first time they could understand my love of the sea.

" the drift and the dream of it, the weave and the wave of it, the fume and the foam of it never left him again " said the pin-striped wearing son of the pirate mother !

I also loved the use of the pirate mother.....an adventurer and someone I could rather identify with myself. Perhaps it also reminds us all not to take life so seriously and that in all of us ther is a Pirate Mother within!

For a mother or father reading to their children at night it's so refreshing to find a story for both parent and child.

Mr. Fat the City Boss is also there to remind us all of the blinkered vision of those caught up in the material world - not realising we've found ourselves trapped in a prison by forgetting the simple wonders of life like the sea.

The philospher is a comforting inclusion to remind us further that not everything will be as it seems.

It is a wonderful journey of the mind to read this book and I wish more children's story books were like it !

I now refer to myself as "the Pirate Mother " and try hard not to forget the lessons learnt from this wonderful tale.

Thank you Margaret Mahy