Looking for Marco Polo
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- ¥710
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- ¥710
発行者による作品情報
Newbery Honor–winning author Alan Armstrong’s latest book!
Eleven-year-old Mark's anthropologist father has disappeared in the Gobi desert while tracing Marco Polo’s ancient route from Venice to China. His mother decides they must go to Venice to petition the agency that sent Mark’s father to send out a search party. Anxious about his father and upset about spending Christmas away from home, Mark gets a bad asthma attack in the middle of the night. That’s when Doc Hornaday, an old friend of Mark’s father, makes a house call, along with a massive black Tibetan mastiff called Boss. To distract Mark from his wheezing and to pass the long Venetian night, the Doc starts to spin for Mark the tale of Marco Polo. Doc describes Marco’s travels and the boy finds himself falling under the spell of the story that has transfixed the world for centuries. Marco’s journey bolsters Mark’s courage and whets his appetite for risk and adventure, and for exposure to life in all its immense and fascinating variety.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Newbery Honor author Armstrong (Whittington) weaves the story of Marco Polo into an entertaining contemporary tale. Eleven-year-old Mark's father, a passionate anthropologist, leaves for a six-month research trip to study Mongol herders in the Gobi Desert. When his father disappears, Mark and his mother travel to Venice in the hopes of finding him through the agency he works for. There, Mark suffers an asthma attack and spends time with Doctor Hornaday, an acquaintance of his father's, and his mastiff, Boss, both of whom are Marco Polo scholars and great storytellers ("Stories and strangenesses are like falling feathers they pass and are gone forever unless you catch them as they go," remarks Hornaday). Like Mark, readers should quickly be drawn into Marco Polo's colorful life and his travels, a story purportedly passed down through generations of people and animals ("Dogs have history just like people," Boss tells Jack. "We know. We remember"). Mark's authentic and emotional letters to his father and Jessell's detailed pencil drawings enhance this rich recreation of the late 13th century. Ages 8 12.
