As this book is a picture book with two page spreads, the PDF version is recommended for optimal viewing.

“I’m not much for mistakes, and I mean that sincerely. Any pirate who makes one will pay for it dearly!” says new favorite pirate personality, Captain LaPlank. A cleverly written and beautifully illustrated children’s book launching on International Pirate Day, Captain LaPlank: The Perfect Pirate (September 19, 2018) entertains school-aged children while ever so subtly delivering a message around imperfection, leadership, and learning to live with mistakes.

This whimsical, rhyming pirate adventure tells a funny story of LaPlank perfectly captaining his ship as his new crew watches, until one by one they begin making minor mistakes and are shown the plank! Trusting no one to do a finer job than himself, “He did all the cooking, cleaning, and steering in a fearsome display of extreme buccaneering. His new problem was jobs. He had rather too many. But then where was the fun? He was not having any.”

It’s a classic and timely tale of something our culture today struggles to overcome, the desire to be perfect and in control. At a time when parents and children are bombarded by images in the media of perfect families and extreme athletic, educational, and financial success, we have much to learn from LaPlank’s epiphany, “It has nothing to do with ship captains and crews—perfection’s not something that pirates can choose. They’d bungled their business but those are the breaks—mistakes are just something that everyone makes!”