The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers

As with the Malmstrom, Bluebear often finds safety in the nick of time.īluebear also makes some extraordinary friends during his adventures. He will have to survive encounters with incredible monsters from a cyclopean black whale, the hallucinatory spider witch and the incredibly annoying Troglotroll (never trust a Troglotroll!). The Malmstrom is just the first of many natural hazards he will have to overcome, from underground labyrinths, inescapable forests and uncrossable deserts, even travels between dimensions and through time.

So ends the first of Bluebear’s lives.īy the end of this book, Bluebear will have shared with you half of his 27 lives filled with extraordinary adventures in an around Zamonia – a continent between Europe and America which has since disappeared beneath the waves.

With no alternative, the Minipirates abandon Bluebear on an island with a bottle of seaweed juice and a loaf of seaweed bread. In his time aboard their ship Bluebear learns all they have to teach him of seamanship and becomes a master knot maker.īut Bluebear soon starts to outgrow their ship, as you can tell from the picture on the book cover. They are, however, the world’s best seamen, able to negotiate any storm. The Miniprates each have two peg legs, two iron hooks for hands and an eye patch over either their left or right eye. When they attack regular-sized ships, those ships and their crew continue on unaware that there is an attempted assault underway. The Minipirates as you would guess are miniscule pirates, so small most people are unaware of their existence. Just when his life seemed to be ending before it has really begun, he is rescued at the last moment by the Minipirates.

Unknown to him, he was heading for the Malmstrom a gigantic permanent whirlpool. In a rare occasion of reality meeting very high expectations, reading it delivered everything I hoped for.īluebear’s earliest memory is of being tiny and alone, adrift on the ocean in a walnut shell-half. From the first time I saw it in a bookstore, The 13 ½ Lives of Captain Bluebear was a book I simply could not walk away from.

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear by Walter Moers