Book description
Robin Starveling, aka Noah Vaile, is scooped off the streets of
seventeenth-century Bristol, England, and dragged onboard a ship bound
for Virginia by the murderous William Thatcher, who needs a servant
with no past and no future to aid him in a nefarious plot to steal
gold. Starveling fits the bill perfectly since he lives nowhere and
has no parents. Aboard the ship, Starveling makes friends with a young
cabin boy, Peter Fence.
Together the two boys suffer through a frightening hurricane and are
shipwrecked on the mysterious Isle of Devils. They solve the ciphers
embedded in emblems found in Thatchers sea chest, which has washed up
with the wreck, then make their way through gloomy forests and
tortuous labyrinths to a cave on the shore that houses a wizard-like
old man. Beset by danger and villainy on every side, they finally
discover the old mans identity and unearth a treasure that is much
rarer and finer than gold.
Lynne Kositsky is an award-winning poet and the author of several
novels in Penguin's Our Canadian Girl series, including Rachel: A
Mighty Big Imagining, which won the White Raven Award. Lynne's
fiction has been nominated for the Geoffrey Bilson, White Pine, Golden
Oak, Hackmatack Awards, in 2006 she won the Canadian Jewish Book Award
for Youth for The Thought of High Windows. She lives in
Vineland, Ontario, with her husband, Michael, a composer, and her two
shelties, who provided the template for Tempest, the doggy character
in Minerva's Voyage.
