The Pocket Pirates series opens with a strangely domestic sort of adventure, but there are limitations when your pirate ship rests in a bottle on the fireplace mantel of Mr. Tooey's junk shop. When fiendish mice kidnap the pirates' tiny cat and demand cheese as ransom, the four miniature pirates spring into action. Armed with safety pins and cocktail sticks, they break into the refrigerator. Next, inspired by the Trojan horse, Button (the ship's boy) and Lily (the youngest pirate) hide inside a hollowed-out chunk of cheese, rescue their cat from the mice's den, and escape to the ship. Moving along at a good pace, the text includes plenty of comic bits as well as inventive details based on how the tiny characters manage in their full-scale environment, where even a spider becomes a menacing threat. It's the artwork, though, that brings the story to life through deft, quirky ink drawings of the characters in action. The writer-illustrator of the Something Wickedly Weird books, Mould now offers an appealing adventure series for younger chapter-book readers.

A crew of ship-in-a-bottle pirates lives in an old junk shop and comes out to explore when the shop is closed. In Cheese, the Pocket Pirates' cat is kidnapped and ransomed by a band of baseboard mice. In Drain, they plan an escape when their route to the kitchen is blocked. Swashbuckling adventure meets the miniaturized whimsy of The Borrowers in these British chapter books illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings.

Two-inch pirates sally forth to the rescue when their cat is kidnapped by malign mice.When Pepper Jack and his knavish crew of wall-dwelling rodents spirit off furry Jones, they leave an eloquent if nonverbal ransom note consisting of pictures of a cat and a wedge of cheese. Instantly, intrepid ship's boy Button, matey Lily, Capt. Crabsticks, and seasoned salt Old Uncle Noggin set out from their junk-store ship in a bottle to raid the chilly realm of Fridge in the owner's back apartment for the redolent ransom (and to restock their own larder). Neither attacks from voracious woodlice and a gigantic slobbery dog nor the slimy necessity of hiding out in a tub of margarine and a half-used can of dog food sway the expedition from its mission(s). A cutaway view of the shop at the end with labels aplenty allows readers to retrace the outing's winding course. Festooning his simply told yarn with drawings of diminutive buccaneers (all white) in exaggeratedly swashbuckling costume amid the clutter and outsized provender of a human-sized world, Mould brings his Pocket Pirates series to this side of the briny deep in fine adventuresome style.As Button puts it: "We may be tiny, but we're still fearsome." Aye to that. (Fantasy. 8-10)