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by Mike Mirabella (Author), Amy O'Hanlon (Illustrator)
On The Luck of an Irish Sailor is a fantasy tale of how a young Irish sailor, while cast adrift in the ocean sea, is then saved from drowning by both the efforts of a mermaid princes and his Irish luck.
The tale was inspired by the stories I heard as a little boy while sitting at the kitchen table at our large Italian family dinners. My grandpa and uncles would tell tales of fishing the waters off the Coast of California and up through the inland passages of Alaska. I recall my grandpa Angelo telling of the scary time when he was a cabin boy of 12, and was captured by pirates while working on the tall ships. And then there was the never-ending argument of whether the strange creature my grandpa and my uncle Cam had caught off the coast of Alaska was either a mermaid or a merman.
I was (and still am), that wee lad in our story, sitting wide-eyed and half-believing, but never tiring of hearing those wonder filled stories told by those 'salty old jacks'.
