Starboard
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Nicola Skinner's inventive, funny, surprising prose once again tells an honest story of big emotions, making Starboard the perfect follow-up to the critically acclaimed Storm.
Kirsten Bramble is too famous to have friends. That’s what she tells herself, anyway—but with the end of her hit reality TV show barreling toward her, Kirsten’s not sure she’s ready to say goodbye to her lonely life of fame.
Luckily—or unluckily—Kirsten can’t help being plunged headfirst into a new adventure when she’s dragged on a class trip to visit the SS Great Britain. Because somehow, the ancient ship can speak to her—and she wants Kirsten to be her new captain.
The ship pulls out of the harbor with no sails and no working engine, and try as Kirsten might, she can’t convince the ship to turn back until they find a way to help her finish her final quest.
Kirsten doesn’t feel like a captain—but along the way, she may just realize that the ending of an adventure, while scary, can be just as special as the beginning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Bristol field trip turns sea adventure for a young reality-TV star in this thoughtful swashbuckling fantasy from Skinner (Storm). Eleven-year-old Kirsten Bramble is known for At Home with the Brambles, a show that evolved from Kirsten's desire to help her adopted father find true love. Kirsten's under pressure to promote the Bramble brand, but she swaps television drama for her own desires during a field trip to the formerly renowned SS Great Britain, which finds her immediately taken with the docked ship. After she dons a long-missing captain's hat while aboard, a people-reading map reveals that Kirsten is a chosen one whose needs are "eerily tangled up" with those of the vessel, and they must make a journey in which things will be named, people will be forgiven, and truths will be revealed. Magically, the ship takes to the sea, peopled by Kirsten; estranged best friend Olive Chudley, who has a history with Kirsten's family's show; and a crew of animate fiberglass museum-display mannequins. Acknowledging the feeling of an ill-fitting existence and the thrill of true connection (the ship "radiated a mysterious power. It made her stop walking. It made her hold her breath"), a mystically tinged third-person voice follows the memorable characters' slow-growing sense of authenticity and self following myriad losses. Human protagonists cue as English and white. A historical note concludes. Ages 8–12.
