by Patricia Reilly Giff
I should review The Gift of the Pirate Queen while the tears are still streaming out of my eyes. I'd rank it right up there with Ellen Tebbits and The Boxcar Children, two books I read over and over again in grade school. I actually own a copy of each, picked up long after I left home and moved into an apartment. An adult, theoretically.
Gift of the Pirate Queen would have been another of them, if I'd encountered it. But did it belong in Shelf Discovery: the Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading? Probably not--it's a classic but hardly a teen classic. When I was a teenager I was reading Barnabas Collins and Fahrenheit 451 and The Warlock In Spite of Himself.
But if you're twelve, read it. It is a funny, friendly story of a girl who thinks she's lacking in courage but isn't; who wants to be a veterinarian; looks after her goat and her adopted dog; takes care of her diabetic little sister Amy; does the cooking and cleans the house (maybe not perfectly but perfectly well enough); and does her homework. With all that, suddenly her Father decides to bring his cousin Fiona, unmarried, elderly and a little strange-looking, over from Ireland to take care of the girls. Grace is having none of it.
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