We chuckle at The Pirates Are Coming! every time we handle a copy. The twist on the last page is the reason.
The setup is the Boy Who Cried Wolf in pirate form. A boy on pirate-watch at the top of a hill keeps shouting “pirates!” at ships that turn out to be a row of monks or a circus troupe. The villagers race up the hill, go back down grumbling, and by the time actual pirates appear on the horizon, nobody bothers coming.
That part is pretty predictable. You can see the shape coming from page three. This is not a flaw, because the pay-off is not in the setup.
The final spread does something you do not expect. We will not give it away, but the villagers react to the pirate landing in a way that reframes the whole book. The joke is on every reader who thought they knew this story.
John Condon writes and Matt Hunt illustrates. The text is pared back and the pictures carry most of the punch. Once you know the twist, you want to watch somebody else meet it. We put it into Reception class sets on that basis.