A 13-year-old British midshipman logs seven months of rip-roaring nautical adventure, experiencing hurricane, shipwreck, fever, earthquake, kidnapping, sea fights, and plenty more. Pleased to find himself aboard the sloop Bream, with its “beams imbued with mackerel-stink; and a rottenness that comes of boiled rags mixed with the sweet fetor of things decomposing out of sight,” Tom ships out with an array of disreputable shipmates, including Peter Mangrove, one-legged former slave of Lord Nelson. Their goal is to protect Caribbean-merchant shipping from piratical Americans and other unsavory sorts. Thanks to sharp eyes and a knack for survival, Tom quickly rises to Lieutenant—despite at one point being caught between loyalty to the Crown and his attraction to the magnificent pirate Obediah, an Afro-Portuguese native of Glasgow. Hausman (Doctor Bird, 1998, etc.) bases his tale on two historical novels of the 1830s, one of which may have inspired the young Robert Louis Stevenson. Like Geraldine McCaughrean’s Pirate’s Son (1998), this grand mix of pulse-pounding action, vivid language, exotic locales, and colorful characters fits firmly in the tradition of Treasure Island. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-82810-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Robbins (Autumn Leaves, 1998, etc.) chooses a bright palette for his hand-colored photographs, painting the cabs of a series of big rigs in eye-catching shades with trailers and backgrounds in paler tints, but many of the shots are taken from such a distance that the look is artificial, without detail or a sense of scale. The author compounds the sense of distance by showing several truckers but not introducing them; although he describes, in brief, the parts of a tractor-trailer and the kinds of loads it can haul, he skips what’s under the hood or on the dashboard. Compared to books such as Hope Irwin Marston’s Big Rigs (1993), David Jefferis’s Giants of the Road (1991), or even Robbins’s own Trucks Of Every Sort (1981), this comes off more as an exercise in artistic technique, with terse accompanying captions, than a portrait gallery leveled at young truck enthusiasts. (Picture book. 6-9)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-82664-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
Ryan and Selznick skillfully blend fact and fiction for a rip-roaring tale of an utterly credible adventure. On April 20, 1933, Amelia Earhart had dinner at the White House with her friend, Eleanor Roosevelt. Amelia’s description of flying at night so entranced Eleanor that the two of them, still in their evening clothes, flew in a Curtis Condor twin-motor airplane and were back in time for dessert. Eleanor herself had studied for a pilot’s license, but had to be content driving instead. Selznick has created marvelous graphite pictures, with slight washes of color, for scenes based on accounts and descriptions of the evening, right down to the china on the White House table. Using a slightly exaggerated style and a superb sense of line and pattern, he plays with varying perspectives, close-ups, and panoramas to create a vivid visual energy that nicely complements the text. There is sheer delight in the friends’ shared enjoyment of everything from a formal dinner and fine gloves to the skies they navigated. A final historical photograph shows the two on the plane that night. (Picture book. 5-10)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-96075-X
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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