JACK PLANK TELLS TALES

Babbitt’s first offering in 25 years does not disappoint. Jack’s pirate crew has fallen on hard times, and as Jack prefers not to take part in the plundering and so contributes the least to their profits, the crew decides that they have to let him go. Jack gets a room at Mrs. Delfresno’s inn and eagerly begins to look for a second career. However, at the end of each day, Jack returns to the inn disappointed and still jobless. Each evening he explains to Mrs. Delfresno and the other boarders why he simply cannot work as a farmer, or a baker, or a fisherman, or, it seems, anything else. And each explanation is somehow connected to a riveting story from his days as a pirate. Jack’s reason, for instance, that he cannot possibly work as a fisherman, is that one of his pirate cohorts, Figley, had morphed into an octopus in the light of the full moon, and for all Jack knows, the fellow might very well still be swimming around somewhere. Jack spins other yarns about fortune tellers, mummy hands, trolls and even a girl who grew up as a seagull. By the final page, it’s obvious what Jack (and Babbitt) can do better than almost anyone else—tell a really good story. (Fiction. 8-11)