Given the onscreen exploits of Johnny Depp and his Caribbean cronies in recent years, there’s a high degree of pirate literacy on school playgrounds all over Canada – backed by a huge interest in all kinds of swashbuckler-based media for young people. But while everything about the outward presentation of X Doesn’t Mark the Spot – beginning with its title and subtitle, and continuing with the illustrated cover featuring four unmistakably pirate-looking types digging for treasure – suggests the book will be packed with pirate lore, there is actually very little such material in its 80-plus pages.

Author Ed Butts, whose previous young-people’s book was S.O.S.: Stories of Survival, has, in fact, compiled 11 narratives about Canadian searches for buried treasure, lost riches, and the like. That allows him to include one authentic pirate tale based in Canada – that of Captain Kidd and the persistent rumour of the huge stash of gold he deposited somewhere in Atlantic Canada before his 1701 hanging – but the rest are stories that include the legends of hidden treasure in New France, the search for the Lost Lemon Mine of Western Canada, and the continual attempts to find buried loot in the sands of Sable Island. All riveting narratives, for sure, but none can truly be said to be about pirates in the classic eyepatch-and-parrot sense.

If young readers do feel a sense of disappointment at not finding more peg legs and bottles of rum in this book, Butts’s storytelling skills may still win them over. He has a knack for combining straight historical narrative with the underlying theme of the book – that greed makes people do all sorts of strange things, not the least of which is pursuing sketchy information, following superstitious beliefs, and killing someone when he gets in the way of what you want.