Avis Dolphin

by Frieda Wishinsky, Willow Dawson (Illustrator)

Overview

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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781554984909
Publisher:	Groundwood Books Ltd
Publication date:	03/25/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	128
Lexile:	570L (what's this?)
File size:	13 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	9 - 12 Years

About the Author

FRIEDA WISHINSKY is the award-winning author of more than eighty books — including picture books, novels and nonfiction — which have been translated into many languages. Each One Special, illustrated by Werner Zimmerman, was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award, and Please, Louise! illustrated by Marie-Louise Gay, won the Marilyn Baillie Picture Book Award. More recently, Frieda has written the novel A Flower is a Friend, illustrated by Karen Patkau, and How to Become an Accidental Entrepreneur with Elizabeth MacLeod. Frieda grew up in Manhattan and has always loved crossing the Brooklyn Bridge. She now lives in Toronto, Ontario.

Willow Dawson is an award-winning author and illustrator whose books include Ghost Limb, Hyena in Petticoats, Lila and Ecco’s Do-It-Yourself Comics Club, and the upcoming The Wolf-Birds. Willow lives in Toronto.

Editorial Reviews

02/16/2015
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. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Moving and inventive . . . a vivid and relatable account of a not-so-distant tragedy.

Quill & Quire

Together, Frieda Wishinsky and Willow Dawson tell an incredible story of unlikely friendship, travelling during wartime, and, most importantly, hope.

CM Magazine

This child’s view of the event with eye-catching illustrations is an accessible take on the historic event.

Booklist

Avis’s unforgettable journey of friendship, courage, tragedy, and hope will captivate and resonate with readers.

National Reading Campaign

"The lifeboat cracks. We’re tipping. Tipping. Tipping into the sea.
I’m under. Icy water fills my nose. My ears. I hold my breath. The sea is dark. My feet and hands are numb. No. No. I can’t die.

I kick. Kick. Hard. Harder. Fight."
 
— from the book 

From the Publisher

06/01/2015
Gr 4–6—When 12-year-old Avis Dolphin alights onto the Lusitania, she asks herself, "Why can't someone write one [adventure story] about a girl? Girls like magic and adventure, too." Indeed, many a girl will identify with this inequity that Wishinsky seeks to address with this illustrated work, a genre-busting fantasy with graphic novel-type images, crossed with a work of historical fiction. The timely book follows the titular character's journey aboard the Lusitania on its ill-fated voyage, along with other historical passengers, such as her romantically obsessed guardians Hilda and Sarah, and the kindly Professor Holbourn, who befriends Avis. Avis is a lively heroine who is excited about every aspect of life on the "Lusy," and relays it all in breathless, excited monologues. Readers will be swept up in Avis's descriptions of the ship mechanics, gourmet food, and people-watching. Professor Holbourn's stories about the mythical past of his home in Scotland are represented in the book as mostly wordless graphic panels, which are lovely, but become repetitive. The biggest issue facing the book is tone—Wishinsky goes overboard with the foreshadowing, so that the clues to the Lusitania's fate are almost comical in their exuberance and overabundance, detracting from the mood and underestimating the intelligence of her audience. VERDICT An additional purchase.—Susannah Goldstein, Convent of the Sacred Heart, New York City

School Library Journal

2015-02-03
Readers who think that the Titanic was the only great ocean liner that ever sank will find this fictionalized eyewitness account of the torpedoed Lusitania's last voyage a revelation.If, that is, they can get through the narrative without foundering on the nearly continual foreshadowing that clogs its pages. Naming her title character and other cast members after actual passengers, Wishinsky trots 12-year-old Avis over several days through a purposeful ship's tour that takes her from bustling galley to common areas of all three classes. She is squired by Prof. Holbourn, a genial fellow traveler who regales her with a magical tale of a young castaway facing a giant and a "bogeyman." This nested story is related by Dawson in interspersed sections of wordless sequential panels. Along the way, Wishinsky shovels in ominous references to U-boats, an angry refusal by the ship's captain to hold lifeboat drills, the disappearance of the ship's cat and so many other hints of impending catastrophe that the torpedoes' eventual arrival comes as more of a relief than a shock. Dawson's high-contrast black-and-white scenes add a little suspense, but their plotline is at best marginally relevant to the main one, and they are so cramped and cropped that the action in them is hard to follow. The author closes with a note on the real Avis and Prof. Holbourn. Arty illustrations and a turgid, purpose-driven narrative waste this opportunity to highlight a major tragedy in its centennial year. Interested readers will get more from Diana Preston's Remember the Lusitania! (2003). (afterword) (Historical fiction. 9-11)

Kirkus Reviews