historical fiction, adventure, suspense, animals, Interest level: grade 4, GLE: 5.2, 2006.

Sam Harris is a twelve-year-old boy traveling on the Titanic. He first finds himself bored and lonely, until he discovers the Titanic's kennels. He quickly befriends a irish setter named Star. When disaster strikes the ship, Star and Sam must work together to survive. ( )

this book is about two young boys and a dog one of the boys was named bucky or his real name buckthorn and another boy named sam and his real name is samson and they are boarded on the titanic and they meet a famous guys dog well the dog does not have a name and sam named him star when the titanic was sinking it was a real drama play and all the life boats were gone so star jumped off the boat carrying sam and they got rescued.read it 4 yourself ( )

#127, 2006

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, my son and I did – and we had a good discussion about it, too. 9/10 ( )

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