The Magic of Ink: All Sail Set

Thursday, December 13, 2007

All Sail Set

A Romance of the Flying Cloud
by Armstrong Sperry

Ships enchant Enoch Thacher, which makes East Boston—where ships are built, docked, and sailed from—his paradise. His friend the old captain Messina Clarke teaches him the ways of the sea and tells him yarns of when he was a young man and sailed the world. After the sudden death of his father, the fourteen-year-old must find work to support his mother, and turns to Donald McKay, a friend of his father and designer of clipper ships. Fate brings Enoch and the most famous clipper ever built, the Flying Cloud, together from the time she is just a model on McKay’s desk. The boy watches the construction of the Cloud from blueprints on up, and knows that someday he will sail aboard her. Enoch leaps at the chance when it comes, and signs aboard for the Cloud’s second voyage—on the dangerous passage around Cape Horn to California and then on to China. Can the crew—and the ship—endure and survive the hardships?
Enoch’s journey is filled with new adventures, danger, and ancient seafaring stories, all in only 171 pages, making it a nice introduction to epics of the sea for the younger readers. Overall, All Sail Set reminded me of a Misty of Chincoteague aimed at boys; for the love of a horse, for the love of a ship, and growing up along the way. But the characters were sadly flat, with only a couple sticking in the reader’s mind after the last page. The adventure-loving reader will enjoy it more than the emotional one.

The third book I’ve read and reviewed for the Seafaring Challenge hosted by I Heart Paperbacks. Only one more book to go before my goal of Admiral! Read others’ reviews at the Seafaring Tales Blog.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Hey, thanks for stopping by! We'd love to hear from you, whatever your opinion, so please write any comments below.

Thoughts on Novels, Books, and Reading

“So many people I know say they hate reading. What they seem not to get is that a book is an alternate universe, where you can go anywhere, or choose to just set the book down and leave that universe alone.” –Zeke Willey

“To read is to fly: it is to soar to a point of vantage which gives a view over wide terrains of history, human variety, ideas, shared experience and the fruits of many inquiries.” –A.C. Grayling, in a review of A History of Reading, by Alberto Manguel

“Read in order to live.” –Gustave Flaubert

“People say that life is the thing, but I prefer reading.” –Logan Pearsall Smith

“Books have a sense of honor. If they are lent out, they will not come back.”

“Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat, or fly into the future.” –Jim Bishop

“Read the best books first or you may not have a chance to read them all.” –Henry David Thoreau

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.” –Carl Sagan

“Book-love...never flags or fails, but, like Beauty itself, is a joy forever.” –Holbrook Jackson

“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.” –Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“Poetry, plays, novels, music, they are the cry of the human spirit trying to understand itself and make sense of our world.” –Annie Sinclair in Annie, Between the States, by L.M. Elliott

“There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away.” –Emily Dickenson

“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading! How much sooner one tires of anything than of a book! When I have a house of my own, I shall be miserable if I have not an excellent library.” –Jane Austen

“Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?” –Henry Ward Beecher

“I ransack public libraries, and find them full of sunk treasure.” –Virginia Woolf

“When I step into this library, I cannot understand why I ever step out of it.” –Marie de Sevigne

“A sure sign of a good book is that you like it more the older you get.” –Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

“Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity.” –G.K. Chesterton

“Just the knowledge that a good book is awaiting one at the end of a long day makes that day happier.” –Kathleen Norris, Hands Full of Living

“A novel is never anything but a philosophy put into images.” –Albert Camus

“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” –Jorge Luis Borges

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” –Francis Bacon

“When I read a book I seem to read it with my eyes only, but now and then I come across a passage, perhaps only a phrase, which has a meaning for me, and it becomes part of me.” –W. Somerset Maugham

“When you sell a man a book you don’t sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue—you sell him a whole new life.” –Christopher Morley

“When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” –Vincent Starrett

“I cannot live without books.” –Thomas Jefferson

“Books allow you to travel wherever you like. And no ticket is required. No toothbrush, even. Just pick your century, your continent, your character—and go.” –T.A. Barron, in an interview with WORD for Teens

“The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.” –Henry Tilney, Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey

“...a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings fromher mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it.”
—Ian McEwan (Atonement)

“A good bookshop is just a genteel Black Hole that knows how to read.” —Terry Pratchett (Guards! Guards!)

“Never put off till tomorrow the book you can read today.” —Holbrook Jackson

“You know you’ve read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.”
—Paul Sweeney

“There is no mistaking a real book when one meets it. It is like falling in love, and like that colossal adventure it is an experience of great social import. Even as the tranced swain, the booklover yearns to tell others of his bliss. He writes letters about it, adds it to the postscript of all manner of communications, intrudes it into telephone messages, and insists on his friends writing down the title of the find. Like the simple-hearted betrothed, once certain of his conquest, “I want you to love her, too!”” —Christopher Morley

Thursday, December 13, 2007

All Sail Set

No comments:

Post a Comment

Meet the Bloggers

Novels on the Big Screen!

Blog Archive

View Posts by Subject

Followers

Bookish Links

Thoughts on Novels, Books, and Reading

I would like to see...