About Polly’s Piralympics by Jann Weeratunga
After discovering treasure — prosthetic arms, blades and racing wheelchairs, Captain Hake issues them to his crew. Soon, they share their treasure with other pirate crews and Polly, the parrot, invents the Piralympics — Paralympics for Pirates.
Events include, climb the rigging gymnastics, walk the plank diving, a MasterChef competition, a rowing event with a sinking feeling and a catapult-shooting event, which goes wrong. Find out why coconuts don’t make good footballs and follow the pirate chefs in their own MasterChef Competition, where are the sausages?
In true pirate fashion, they use gold doubloons as medals, sail in 18th Century ships (sailing ships, flags, muskets and swords), with 21st Century technology (lifts between decks, sonar, Wi-fi, Purpletooth, TV and the internet.) It includes cheating; comradeship; laughter and tears and how we all have a disability – e.g. one arm, no legs, one eye, can’t sing, can’t dance, can’t count, can’t spell or can’t cook and no one is perfect; it’s just that some disabilities are more obvious than others.
The book describes the comical situations that the six ships and their crews, coming from all over the world, find themselves in during the course of the week-long Piralympic games. Their ships and the pirate’s appearance signal them out e.g. Scottish pirates with kilts; Viking pirates with horned helmets and singing Abba songs; Maori pirates with tattooed faces. There are also pirates from South Africa, India and the USA.
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