Giant Rat of Sumatra: Or Pirates Galore ANNOTATION
A cabin boy on a pirate ship finds himself in San Diego in 1846 as war breaks out between the United States and Mexico.
FROM THE PUBLISHER
A swashbuckling pirate ship cuts through the early morning fog. Crouching like a tiger about to spring, her figurehead is a huge and ferocious rat with crooked teeth and gouged-out eyes.
When the daring Giant Rat of Sumatra drops anchor in San Diego, twelve-year-old cabin boy Shipwreck only wants to begin his long journey home to Boston. Instead he encounters: snarling mutineers
barefoot bandits
hairbreadth escapes
duels
cunning barkeeps
simmering revenge
secret identities
scrappy orphans
betrayals
lost loves
old enemies
new villains
heroic last stands
and razzle-dazzle treasure so well hidden that only someone as quick and clever as Shipwreck could keep up with it.
Plucked from the sea by the most notorious pirate in the Pacific, Shipwreck discovers his adventure is only beginning.
About the Author:Newbery Award-winning author of The Whipping Boy, Sid Fleischman is surprised that he grew up to be a writer. "I had a childhood much like everyone else's," he writes in his newly published autobiography, The Abracadabra Kid: A Writer's Life. "What went wrong?"
But his childhood was not so typical after all. Born in Brooklyn, he grew up in San Diego during the Great Depression and decided in the fifth grade to become a magician. Just out of high school, he traveled widely in vaudeville and with a midnight ghost-and-goblin show. "I was on the way to becoming a writer. I just didn't know it."
After wartime service with the U.S. Naval Reserve, he finished college and worked as a reporter on the San Diego DailyJournal. When the paper folded in 1950, he turned to fiction writing. One of Fleischman's novels was bought for a major motion picture, and he was offered a contract to write the screenplay.
"My young children led me into writing children's books. They didn't understand what I did for a living. Other fathers, they learned, left home in the morning and returned at the end of the day. I was always around the house. I decided to clear up the mystery and wrote a book just for them." Today he divides his time between writing films and children's books.
Fleischman says that when he knew very little about writing, he wrote very fast. Now it takes him longer: three months to a year to complete a short book, and sometimes much longer if he can't figure out how to get his characters out of the jams he has put them in. "I write my books in the dark. I don't like to know what's going to happen next until I get there. It sustains my interest. I'm anxious to get to my desk each morning to find out what is going to happen."
Fleischman finds ideas lurking everywhere. His novel The Thirteenth Floor began with the superstition that there is something evil and magical in the number thirteen. The Ghost in the Noonday Sun arose from the folk belief that anyone born at the stroke of midnight has the power to see ghosts. The problem for the writer, he says, is not so much in finding an idea as in figuring out what to do with it. That may take years.
As a children's book author Sid Fleischman feels a special obligation to his readers. "The books we enjoy as children stay with us forever—they have a special impact. Paragraph after paragraph and page after page, the author must deliver his or her best work." With more than 35 books to his credit, some of which have been made into motion pictures, Sid Fleischman can be assured that his work will make a special impact.
Sid Fleischman writes his books at a huge table cluttered with projects: story ideas, library books, research, letters, notes, pens, pencils, and a computer. He lives in an old-fashioned, two-story house full of creaks and character, and enjoys hearing the sound of the nearby Pacific Ocean. He has always lived by the ocean and now lives in Santa Monica, California.
FROM THE CRITICS
KLIATT - Paula Rohrlick
The Giant Rat of Sumatra is a pirate ship, and our narrator is its 12-year-old cabin boy, known as Shipwreck because he survived one. The year is 1846, and the ship arrives in San Diego, center of the hide trade, just as war is breaking out between the US and Mexico. The ship's dashing young master, Captain Gallows, entrusts Shipwreck to conceal a pair of valuable emeralds after Shipwreck foils an attempt on Gallows' life. Then Gallows gives up on pirating and purchases a cattle ranch, hiring Shipwreck to help him. By raising the price he will pay for hides, the captain attempts to ruin an old enemy, only to discover that the enemy had repented and become a kind and generous man. Meanwhile, Shipwreck encounters his captain's long-lost love, now a bandit known as Senorita Wildcat, meets a girl himself, and in the end goes back to sea in order to return home and continue his education. As in Fleischman's other books based on California history, By the Great Horn Spoon! and Bandit's Moon, adventure and humor abound, the action moves swiftly, and our young hero is plucky and resourceful. A lively historical novel. KLIATT Codes: J—Recommended for junior high school students. 2005, HarperCollins, Greenwillow, 208p. illus. map., and Ages 12 to 15.
Kirkus Reviews
Edmund Amos Peters, nearly 13, is the cabin boy on the vessel known as the Giant Rat of Sumatra (named for its memorable figurehead) and the narrator of this delightfully crisp, compact tale of adventure and fortune. He's known as Shipwreck because he was plucked from the remains of one by the pirate who likes to call himself Captain Gallows. Shipwreck accompanies the captain to shore in San Diego, where the pirate's plans to become a gentleman and to find his childhood sweetheart are challenged by bandits and the threat of war. These obstacles are easily but satisfyingly overcome, and Fleischman's prose snaps and crackles with good humor as the amiable buccaneer moves briskly from sea to the port of San Diego and on to his new venture as landowner of a large estate by the sea. The setting in 1846, just before Americans captured San Diego for the U.S., offers an intriguing glimpse of California as its own land. Some threads remain to be gathered at the end, but if this is, as Fleischman says, the end of his California trilogy, they beg another story. Spirited and entertaining. (Fiction. 9-13)
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