I got this handsome softcover at the museum shop at Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth NH, while visiting the historic buildings with a friend on this beautiful day.

Here, Jane Yolen presents summaries of the lives of women pirates from many times and places, with illustrations by Christine Joy Pratt. (The book's signed on the title page by Yolen herself, "One pirate to another"!)

While aimed at younger readers, the book includes accounts of some pretty fierce pirates as well as the government-sanctioned privateers (who were sometimes more civilized than the pirates, and other times... not so much). The accounts go back to Artemesia, a military advisor and naval commander under Persian king Xerxes, and roams around the world to 9th-century Dane Alfhild, 16th-century Irish Grania O'Malley, the well-known Anne Bonney and Mary Read, and Rachel Wall, an 18th-century American woman who was hanged for piracy on Boston Common (the last woman hanged in Massachusetts). And then there's Madame Ching, allegedly the most successful pirate ever, who sailed the South China Sea in the early 19th century. (Rarely for a pirate, Madame Ching lived long enough to retire from the sea, vastly wealthy!)

Guidelines for safely visiting and stocking Little Free Libraries during the COVID-19 pandemic, from the LFL site here.

I left this book in the Little Free Library on this drizzly day; hope someone enjoys it!

[See other recent releases in MA here.]

** Released for the 2022 May Royalty challenge. **