Book Descriptions
for The Little Ships by Louise Borden and Michael Foreman
From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)
"In 1940, I lived with my father in the town of Deal, on the Kent coast of England, safe from the thunder of the Germans' guns in France. Some days in May I could hear it, rolling in big booms across the English Channel. Some days I could feel it, rattling the glass in the windows on our street." So writes a girl who climbed into her brother's clothes and then - unbidden - onto her father's fishing boat to become part of the Amotley group of ships," an armada crossing the Channel to rescue the British soldiers trapped on the sandy beaches of France. Thousands of soldiers were saved by that now legendary civilian armada. Fright, drama and simple heroics are described almost poetically by a girl looking all the while for her brother John but seeing, instead, the horrific details of an army in retreat. Foreman's watercolors vividly expand the first person narrative, while the overall design of the volume adds urgency. An author's note provides facts about this historic effort and an excerpt from Winston Churchill's June 4 speech to Parliament - welcome reality from pages otherwise too amazing to be believed. (Ages 8-12)
CCBC Choices 1997. © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 1997. Used with permission.
From the Publisher
For use in schools and libraries only. In May 1940, some 338,000 besieged British and French soldiers were rescued at Dunkirk by an armada of over 800 assorted crafts. A young girl tells the story from her perspective aboard a "little ship.
Publisher description retrieved from Google Books.