Starboard

A Bristol field trip turns sea adventure for a young reality-TV star in this thoughtful swashbuckling fantasy from Skinner (Storm). Eleven-year-old Kirsten Bramble is known for At Home with the Brambles, a show that evolved from Kirsten’s desire to help her adopted father find true love. Kirsten’s under pressure to promote the Bramble brand, but she swaps television drama for her own desires during a field trip to the formerly renowned SS Great Britain, which finds her immediately taken with the docked ship. After she dons a long-missing captain’s hat while aboard, a people-reading map reveals that Kirsten is a chosen one whose needs are “eerily tangled up” with those of the vessel, and they must make a journey in which things will be named, people will be forgiven, and truths will be revealed. Magically, the ship takes to the sea, peopled by Kirsten; estranged best friend Olive Chudley, who has a history with Kirsten’s family’s show; and a crew of animate fiberglass museum-display mannequins. Acknowledging the feeling of an ill-fitting existence and the thrill of true connection (the ship “radiated a mysterious power. It made her stop walking. It made her hold her breath”), a mystically tinged third-person voice follows the memorable characters’ slow-growing sense of authenticity and self following myriad losses. Human protagonists cue as English and white. A historical note concludes. Ages 8–12. (June)