Review by Booklist Review
In this historical-adventure graphic novel, 12-year-old Jack Hoyton enlists in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars period. On board the HMS Defender he soon learns that a sailor's life is full of hard, boring, sometimes dangerous work. The Defender, a midsize ship, has been on blockade duty along the French coast, plagued by the guns at Dumont. When some of the ship's crew go ashore to capture the battery, they are betrayed and only Jack is small enough to escape through the bars and warn the ship just in time to fight with a much larger French ship. The book provides explanatory notes on each page; it also includes a bibliography and suggests further reading such as C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series. Weigel's old-fashioned comics art shows lots of authentic details of eighteenth-century shipboard life, and there is some battle violence, including images of characters being shot. This picture-book-size graphic novel should find a ready audience of young adventure-loving readers.--Kan, Kat Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 3-6-Written in a comic-book format, this picture book tells the story of life aboard a British naval ship in 1805, the height of the Napoleonic War. Young Jack Hoyton was ship's boy on the frigate HMS Defender. While the story of the 12-year-old and his life aboard the midsize ship is fiction, sidebars provide an enormous amount of supporting information about ships, the British Navy, and the conflict with France, and define words and phrases having to do with ships and sailors, such as "press gangs," "powder monkeys," and "heaving on a reef." This hybrid will lure in young readers with exciting seafaring adventure (and conflict) and fascinating factual tidbits. It offers a well-rounded, if brief, picture of the period. The illustrations, maps, and diagrams are chock-full of details. A rich reading and visual experience.-Jody Kopple, Shady Hill School, Cambridge, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Young Jack Hoyton has joined the British Royal Navy and is assigned to the frigate HMS Defender. Aboard the ship, he's surrounded by intrigue. The sophisticated story revolves around the Defender's task blockading a French town during the Napoleonic Wars. The cartoon-panel illustrations are too tightly packed with dialogue bubbles, but sidebars on each page help explain life in the navy. Reading list. Bib. Copyright 2010 of The Horn Book, Inc. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A fast-paced and fact-laced tale framed in graphic panels puts a young orphan aboard a British frigate for a spot of blockade dutyclimaxed by a brisk exchange with a French three-decker and the fiery destruction of an enemy shipyard. Rated "Boy, Third Class,"12-year-old Jack reports for duty with his lubberly head filled with heroic visions. Months of hard chores and gun drills later, he's ready to measure up when the Defender sails into an ambush engineered by a turncoat crewmember. Though Weigel isn't much for natural-sounding dialogue ("The Admiralty's hoping to box up the Frenchies in their ports so they can't mount an invasion of England," explains an avuncular bosun) he fills the side margins on each page of his action-packed, realistically detailed cartoon scenes with pithy comments on naval argot and discipline, historical background, warfare, weapons and nautical lore. Though it may be a stretch for the episode's likely audience to move on, as the author recommends at the end, to C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brian, Jack's adventures will leave readers in the proper tar-and-gunpowder frame of mind. (resource list) (Graphic fiction. 9-11) ]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
