Inspired by the story of actual passengers on the ill-fated Lusitania, this is a novel of great adventure and suspense, including graphic novel-style illustrations. Avis Dolphin doesn’t want to leave New York and sail to England on the Lusitania. War is raging in Europe, and the Germans threaten to sink the ship. Avis is lonely and afraid until she meets a kindly professor whose stories of a magical island help her face an uncertain future. When the Lusitania is attacked, Avis must draw on all her newfound strength to cope with the confusion, terror and despair. How can she survive the sudden devastation of the ship? Will the people she cares about, especially the professor, live through the horror and danger? The immediacy of Frieda Wishinsky’s voice will engage readers in this thrilling story based on real events. They will identify with Avis and Professor Holbourn as they grapple with a stubborn captain, encounter German stowaways and contend with the feud between Avis’s two cabin mates. In an atmosphere of growing anxiety, readers will be glued to the dramatic events as they unfold and the surprising fate of the people they have come to know. Willow Dawson’s art depicts the stories the professor tells Avis in enchanting graphic-novel form. They provide a riveting magical element to the story, creating a story-within-a-story. Like Avis, readers will fall in love with Foula and will dream of the island long after they have reached the last page of this exciting story. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.1 Refer to details and examples in a text when explaining what the text says explicitly and when drawing inferences from the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.7 Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem).

The delightful adventures of a visually impaired barn cat and his annoying flea, as they set off to experience the world and find themselves participants in some of the most remarkable events of the early twentieth century. Pudding Tat is born on the Willoughby Farm in 1901 — just another one of Mother Tat’s kittens. But it turns out that Pudding is anything but ordinary. He is pure white with pink eyes that, though beautiful, do not see well, and hearing that is unusually acute. He finds himself drawn to the sweet sounds of the world around him — the pattering heartbeat of a nearby mouse, the musical tinkling of a distant stream. Soon the sounds of adventure call to Pudding, too. But before he can strike out into the wide world on his own, he hears a voice — coming from right inside his own ear. A flea has claimed Pudding as his host. The bossy parasite demands that Pudding take him away from the lowly barn and the drunken singing of his fellow fleas. He doesn’t want adventure but a finer life — one where he can enjoy a warm bed and blood flavored not with mice, but with beef tenderloin and cream. Fortunately for this mismatched pair, the world is an extremely interesting place in 1901. Over the next decade and a half, Pudding and his flea find themselves helping to make history — a journey over Niagara Falls in a barrel, a visit to the Pan-American Exposition on the day President McKinley is shot, a luxurious stay in Manhattan with songwriter Vincent Bryan, a terrifying trip on the airship America, and a voyage on the ill-fated Titanic. Through each narrow escape, the call to adventure for the cat, and luxury for his disgruntled flea, beckons them on, right to the devastation of a World War I battlefield. Then Pudding is filled with a new longing, one that brings him, with his flea’s help now, full circle and back home. Correlates to the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts: CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.4.3 Describe in depth a character, setting, or event in a story or drama, drawing on specific details in the text (e.g., a character's thoughts, words, or actions). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.2 Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text, including how characters in a story or drama respond to challenges or how the speaker in a poem reflects upon a topic; summarize the text. CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.5.7 Analyze how visual and multimedia elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text (e.g., graphic novel, multimedia presentation of fiction, folktale, myth, poem). CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.6.3 Describe how a particular story's or drama's plot unfolds in a series of episodes as well as how the characters respond or change as the plot moves toward a resolution.

On May 7, 1915, toward the end of her 101st eastbound crossing, from New York to Liverpool, England, R.M.S. Lusitania-pride of the Cunard Line and one of the greatest ocean liners afloat-became the target of a terrifying new weapon and a casualty of a terrible new kind of war. Sunk off the southern coast of Ireland by a torpedo fired from the German submarine U-20, she exploded and sank in eighteen minutes, taking with her some twelve hundred people, more than half of the passengers and crew. Cold-blooded, deliberate, and unprecedented in the annals of war, the sinking of the Lusitania shocked the world. It also jolted the United States out of its neutrality and hastened the nation's entry into World War I. In her riveting account of this enormous and controversial tragedy, Diana Preston recalls both a pivotal moment in history and a remarkable human drama. The story of the Lusitania is a window on the maritime world of the early twentieth century: the heyday of the luxury liner, the first days of the modern submarine, and the climax of the decades-long German-British rivalry for supremacy of the Atlantic. Above all, it is the story of the passengers and crew on that fateful voyage-a story of terror and cowardice, of self-sacrifice and heroism, of death and miraculous survival.

An acclaimed historian chronicles the birth of weapons of mass destruction during World War I, including the use of poison gas by the Germans at Ypres, the torpedoes that sunk the Lusitania and an aerial bombardment of London by a zeppelin.

Comprised of 200 miles of fine white sand beaches bordering turquoise seas, the 40 islands of the Turks and Caicos (TCI) - historically seen as an appendage of the Bahamas - form a unique Caribbean archipelago.With a pleasant climate all year round, TCI is one of the world's top destinations for diving and snorkelling. With coral reef reaching depths of more than 7,000ft, TCI is world-renowned for its wall diving. Turks and Caicos Islands also reveals the islands' lesser-known terrestrial attractions. Soak up Bermudian architecture in the historical old capital, Cockburn Town; visit one of the best museums in the Caribbean, inspired by the oldest shipwreck in the Americas at Molasses Reef; or simply unwind on one of the country's idyllic beaches.

"Lusitania: She was a ship of dreams, carrying millionaires and aristocrats, actresses and impresarios, writers and suffragettes - a microcosm of the last years of the waning Edwardian Era and the coming influences of the Twentieth Century. When she left New York on her final voyage, she sailed from the New World to the Old; yet an encounter with the machinery of the New World, in the form of a primitive German U-Boat, sent her - and her gilded passengers - to their tragic deaths and opened up a new era of indiscriminate warfare. A hundred years after her sinking, Lusitania remains an evocative ship of mystery. Was she carrying munitions that exploded? Did Winston Churchill engineer a conspiracy that doomed the liner? Lost amid these tangled skeins is the romantic, vibrant, and finally heartrending tale of the passengers who sailed aboard her. Lives, relationships, and marriages ended in the icy waters off the Irish Sea; those who survived were left haunted and plagued with guilt. Now, authors Greg King and Penny Wilson resurrect this lost, glittering world to show the golden age of travel and illuminate the most prominent of Lusitania's passengers. Rarely was an era so glamorous; rarely was a ship so magnificent; and rarely was the human element of tragedy so quickly lost to diplomatic maneuvers and militaristic threats"--

A mother pleads with her son not to sail on a certain steamer because she has dreamt - three times in a row - that the vessel will never reach its destination. Modern-day observers watch in awe as a ghost ship - blazing from bow to stern - dutifully reenacts a two-hundred-year-old tragedy that the observers'' fathers and grandfathers also watched reenacted with the same sense of awe. A crewman walks past a solitary figure seated in the ship''s restaurant only to turn a moment later and find the restaurant empty. A red glow appears in the darkness ahead of a modern warship, and the faint outline of an old galleon, her sails in tatters, is seen approaching against the wind - only to vanish a moment later before the startled eyes of observers. Such strange events have been seen for centuries and continue to be reported even today by witnesses who are, for the most part, sober and responsible human beings. In Lost at Sea folklore specialist Michael Goss and George Behe, an expert on maritime disasters, explore what lies behind these amazing narratives and enduring legends.