Alexandra the Plain
by Prerna Patel (Author), Noor Zaki (Illustrator)
Set Sail on a Pirate Adventure!
Ahoy, explorers! Embark on a swashbuckling journey with a brave girl who joins a pirate crew in this enchanting rhyming storybook. Perfect for children aged 2-8, this beautifully illustrated book takes kids on a thrilling adventure across the seas, where they discover hidden treasures, playful sea creatures, and new friendships.
Ideal for bedtime reading, this pirate adventure for kids combines fun rhymes with delightful illustrations, making it a perfect choice for preschoolers and early readers. Parents and children alike will love reading aloud this interactive, rhyming pirate book, which captures the imagination and encourages the spirit of adventure. Whether it’s storytime for toddlers or a gift for little ones who dream of the sea, this adventure story for children is sure to be a favorite.
Author Guest Post
My name is Prerna Patel, and I have just published my first book. It’s a children’s book, told in rhyming verse, entitled Alexandra the Plain. It’s about a girl of eight who leaves home in search of adventure, and winds up being the most famous pirate captain in the world. But at the height of her power, she feels a yearning to return to the comforts of home, and gives everything up in order to be back with her mother.
I’ve always loved children’s books. They were such a huge part of my childhood, and I’m so excited to be able to contribute in a tiny way to the canon. My parents are immigrants from India, and I am the youngest of their three children and, incidentally, the only one born here in the United States. It was very important to my parents that we received as American of a childhood as possible, and so they went out of their way to read to us as many children’s books as they could. They knew that so many cultural references that we would encounter would be from these tales and myths and fables that parents share with their children, and they didn’t want us to miss out on these things or feel out of place when our friends discussed them.
This dedication to reading and consuming children’s literature, of course, led to many absurd moments. My father, for example, could never figure out why the three bears kept their porridge at different temperatures or how a child could be so careless as to fall asleep in a house inhabited by bears. He’d wonder aloud why, if Jack was so clumsy, Jill wouldn’t just go to fetch the water while Jack waited at the foot of the hill to watch for approaching predators. His response to Icarus falling from the sky was to mutter “stupid child.”
Occasionally, we’d be on vacation and he wouldn’t have a book to read, so he’d attempt to tell one of the more famous stories from his memory. Of course, he’d get everything mixed up and would end up creating something so mind-bending that Lewis Carroll would be proud. I remember one of these stories where Jack and Jill climbed the beanstalk and encountered the princess who slept with a bowl of porridge underneath her mattresses.
Fortunately for me, their plan worked. I was fully ensconced in American culture by the time kindergarten began, and I never felt like cultural references went over my head. And when my own children were born, I so desperately wanted to instill the same love for children’s books in them that my parents had given to me, so my husband and I read to them every single day without fail.
One afternoon, when my kids were maybe four and five years old or so, I was watching them play together. They had made up this fascinating scenario where they were visiting a unicorn island and they each kept up making more and more ridiculous rules that visitors to this magical isle had to follow. I was just so moved by the contours of their imagination, the way that they could just construct this completely implausible world and approach it as though it were as tangible as our world, and I got this urge to write it down so that I wouldn’t forget it.
Three or four days later, I had written Alexandra the Plain. In short order, I wrote maybe five other Alexandra adventures, all inspired by this beautiful encounter with my children’s imagination. I printed them out, put them in a box, and more or less forgot about them.
And then about a year ago, my husband was organizing the mess in our basement, and he found these stories. He brought them to me and wanted to know about them, and so I told him. He listened, and when I was finished, he asked if I’d be okay if he published them. I laughed, because it sounded ridiculous, and I told him to go ahead and try, assuming that nothing would ever come of it.
So he put his head down and brought this story from a dusty box in our basement to now being available on Amazon. He found the illustrator, he uploaded it, he gathered reviews, he’s heading the marketing campaign – it’s all him at this point.
I’m so happy that I get to share this with the world. Alexandra the Plain is a celebration of imagination and the power of children to stir up some mischief wherever they go. Alex is driven by her curiosity, her courage, and her sense of adventure, and she takes these things with her when she steps out into the world. My hope is that every child who reads this book will really connect with both the rhythm of the story and the character of Alex.
About the Author
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