Avis Dolphin
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Inspired by the story of actual passengers on the ill-fated Lusitania, this is a novel of great adventure and suspense, including graphic novel-style illustrations.
Avis Dolphin doesn’t want to leave New York and sail to England on the Lusitania. War is raging in Europe, and the Germans threaten to sink the ship. Avis is lonely and afraid until she meets a kindly professor whose stories of a magical island help her face an uncertain future.
When the Lusitania is attacked, Avis must draw on all her newfound strength to cope with the confusion, terror and despair. How can she survive the sudden devastation of the ship? Will the people she cares about, especially the professor, live through the horror and danger?
The immediacy of Frieda Wishinsky’s voice will engage readers in this thrilling story based on real events. They will identify with Avis and Professor Holbourn as they grapple with a stubborn captain, encounter German stowaways and contend with the feud between Avis’s two cabin mates. In an atmosphere of growing anxiety, readers will be glued to the dramatic events as they unfold and the surprising fate of the people they have come to know.
Willow Dawson’s art depicts the stories the professor tells Avis in enchanting graphic-novel form. They provide a riveting magical element to the story, creating a story-within-a-story.
Like Avis, readers will fall in love with Foula and will dream of the island long after they have reached the last page of this exciting story.
Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts:
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.1
Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.7
Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In time for the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Lusitania, Wishinsky (A History of Just About Everything) brings readers aboard the ship through the fictionalized story of Avis Dolphin, a real-life 12-year-old who survived its torpedoing. From the start, ominous signs are everywhere the ship's cat appears to have deserted, the lifeboat drills are a joke, and Avis's new acquaintance, Professor Ian Holbourn (also a real person), continually worries over the ship's safety and its crew's preparedness. Offsetting the professor's concerns is a story he tells Avis about the Scottish island of Foula; his tale of a shipwrecked girl's magical, dangerous adventures on the island unfolds in haunting, near-wordless b&w comics sequences from Dawson (The Big Green Book of the Big Blue Sea). Though Avis meets several children on board, they receive little attention; Avis is more focused on the professor's companionship and the romantic travails of the young nurses accompanying her. While Wishinsky incorporates a wealth of contextual information into the story, readers already aware of the Lusitania's fate may grow impatient with the slow, portentous buildup to the disaster. Ages 9 12.
