Launching ‘Deadly Voyage’

Deadly Voyage, my latest novel in the I Am Canada series from Scholastic,  will be published this  September (2011).   It tells the story of Jamie Laidlaw, a boy from Montreal who is returning home from England on the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic.  On the night of April 14-15, 1912, Jamie find himself in the freezing north Atlantic as the giant ship sinks before his eyes.  Jamie is a fictional character but most of the people he meets on board the Titanic are real.  As with my first novel in the IAC series, Prisoner of Dieppe, I’ve made this book as accurate and true-to-life as possible.  When I give school talks, my readers always want to know, “Is this story real?” Having worked on so many Titanic books — from Robert Ballard’s The Discovery of the Titanic to Polar the Titanic Bear-– I have a fair bit of detail in my brain about this famous shipwreck.  And I also asked George Behe, a Titanic historian par excellence to review it for accuracy.  And the result, I hope, is a novel that is engaging and exciting as well as a realistic depiction of what happened on the April night almost a century ago.