Hurricane Dancers: The First Caribbean Pirate Shipwreck - Softcover

Engle, Margarita

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1250040108 ISBN 13: 9781250040107

Publisher: Square Fish, 2014

Synopsis

Quebrado has been traded from pirate ship to ship in the Caribbean Sea for as long as he can remember. The sailors he toils under call him el quebrado―half islander, half outsider, a broken one. Now the pirate captain Bernardino de Talavera uses Quebrado as a translator to help navigate the worlds and words between his mother's Taíno Indian language and his father's Spanish.
But when a hurricane sinks the ship and most of its crew, it is Quebrado who escapes to safety. He learns how to live on land again, among people who treat him well. And it is he who must decide the fate of his former captors. Latino interest.

About this title

About the Author:

Margarita Engle is a Cuban American poet, novelist, and journalist whose work has been published in many countries. She is the author of young adult nonfiction books and novels in verse, including The Surrender Tree, a Newbery Honor Book; The Poet Slave of Cuba; The Firefly Letters; and Tropical Secrets. She lives in northern California.

From Booklist:

*Starred Review* Engle, whose award-winning titles include the Newbery Honor Book, The Surrender Tree (2008), offers another accomplished historical novel in verse set in the Caribbean. Young Quebrado’s name means “the broken one,” a child “of two shattered worlds.” The son of a Taíno Indian mother and a Spanish father, he is taken in 1510 from his village on the island that is present-day Cuba and enslaved on a pirate’s ship, where a brutal conquistador, responsible for thousands of deaths throughout the Americas, is held captive for ransom. When a hurricane destroys the boat, Quebrado is pulled from the water by a fisherman, Naridó, whose village welcomes him, but escape from the past proves nearly impossible. Once again, Engle fictionalizes historical fact in a powerful, original story. With the exception of Quebrado, all the characters are based on documented figures (discussed in a lengthy author’s note), whose voices narrate many of the poems. While the shifting perspectives create a somewhat dreamlike, fractured story, Engle distills the emotion in each episode with potent rhythms, sounds, and original, unforgettable imagery. Linked together, the poems capture elemental identity questions and the infinite sorrows of slavery and dislocation, felt even by the pirate’s ship, which “remembers / her true self, / her tree self, / rooted / and growing, / alive, / on shore.” Grades 6-10. --Gillian Engberg

About this edition

• Publisher: Square Fish
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1250040108
• ISBN 13: 9781250040107
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176