#127 - White Star — 1 year ago
This week, it was our turn to choose a book for our homeschooling book club, and this is the one that we chose. We hadn’t read it before, but it looked good, and there was a study guide on the RMS Titanic website, so I figured it was probably a pretty good book.
It was a good book. It’s a very nicely done fictional treatment of the disaster, through the eyes of a 12-year-old boy who befriends one of the dogs on board the ship. Rather than focusing on the people on board, the author put a lot of focus on the dozen or so dogs who had been brought on board the ship by passenders. I suspect this was perhaps her way of getting the point across to children that lives were lost (many of the dogs on board did not survive), without dwelling too much on the loss of human life. In any case, that’s how the kids in the bookclub seemed to respond to the book. Almost all of them really enjoyed it – definitely, me and my son did – and we had a good discussion about it, too. 9/10

