Edited by: Gideon Defoe

Publisher: Pantheon Books

We’re not talking about Johnny Depp here (sorry ladies), but if you like Monty Python and titles with exclamation points strike your fancy, then you’ll appreciate this particular brand of humor—that is, as long as you’re not a grim historian with no imagination.

We first met the young pirate master—otherwise known as British author Gideon Defoe—a few years ago when he wrote The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists. A few laughed aloud at his juvenile adventure series, so he continued his characters’ escapades with a second release, titled The Pirates! In an Adventure with Whaling in the United Kingdom and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Ahab in the United States. Now he has finally presented the much anticipated The Pirates! In an Adventure with Communisists, complete with the same absurd adventures, footnotes providing needless bits of information and pointless trivia.

This particular quest concerns the captain and his crew (with font and other nonsense employed to define personality traits) finding their way to the booty, while dodging forces of oppression along the way. The voyage begins in Victorian-era London, where police take the Pirate Captain into custody after mistaking him for the notorious Communist Karl Marx.

The expedition has everything you can imagine from a buccaneer adventure: a red-eyed monster, a sack of pretend kittens, stolen waxworks and, of course, the captain’s crew of no-name pirates. What did the pirate get when he cut himself in battle? A scaaaaRRRRrrrr!