Cruise Ship Kid: Thief at Sea!
Silver is an apt name for the heroine of this delightful story! Silver is ten years old with an alluring and sparkling personality; she also happens to live on a cruise ship with her mum and her group of grown-up friends. What Silver yearns for is a friend her own age and when she meets Yana, she thinks she’s found the perfect candidate, but the reader can see that Yana is not a nice friend. Silver endures embarrassment and humiliation in her desperate efforts to find a pal, while at the same time trying to track down the thief who’s pinched two fancy watches.
This is a story about friendship and recognising what’s really important in life. Silver’s detective adventure is presented as a stream of consciousness, where we read what she’s saying and thinking and how her thoughts skip off in different directions. This gives rise to genuinely funny observations and situations. Descriptions of her gang of geriatric cruise passenger pals are hilarious. The author spent her own childhood on cruise ships and there’s a lovely empathy for all the staff and how hard they work throughout the story.
The illustrations are plentiful, quirky and fun and the reader is invited to scribble answers to questions and doodle throughout the book, providing a great opportunity to thoroughly engage with the story. This means the reader actually becomes part of the story. It is easy to imagine an eight-year-old, pencil at the ready, fully engrossed and enjoying every page.
