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Gr 5-8 To say that this lively novel is Dickensian is to understate its debt to that author. The story abounds in terrifying villains, grime, misery, and cruelty. Yet it also serves up a fair share of optimism. The narrator, Tom Tin, has fallen on hard times through no fault of his own. When his father, an unemployed ship's captain, is taken to debtor's prison, Tom discovers the dark underbelly of 19th-century London. He has the incredible luck of finding a valuable diamond, on...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

In this vivid novel set in nineteenth-century England, narrator Tom Tin, fourteen, is charged with murder and taken in chains to the Lachesis, a grounded hulk of a prison ship for boys. In his author's note, Lawrence states that the wretched details about life on the Lachesis are based on actual accounts of prison ships in the early 1800s ("The only thing that's certain is that the real Euryalus was more terrible than my Lachesis"). Where h...Log In or Sign Up to Read More