Minerva's Voyage - Couverture souple

Robin Starveling, aka Noah Vaile, is scooped off the streets of seventeenth-century Bristol, England, and dragged onboard a ship bound for Virginia by the murderous William Thatcher, who needs a servant with no past and no future to aid him in a nefarious plot to steal gold. Starveling fits the bill perfectly since he lives nowhere and has no parents. Aboard the ship, Starveling makes friends with a young cabin boy, Peter Fence. Together the two boys suffer through a frightening hurricane and are shipwrecked on the mysterious Isle of Devils. They solve the ciphers embedded in emblems found in Thatcher's sea chest, which has washed up with the wreck, then make their way through gloomy forests and tortuous labyrinths to a cave on the shore that houses a wizard-like old man. Beset by danger and villainy on every side, they finally discover the old man's identity and unearth a treasure that is much rarer and finer than gold.

Lynne Kositsky is an award-winning poet and the author of several novels including Rachel: A Mighty Big Imagining, which won the White Raven Award. Her fiction has been nominated for the Geoffrey Bilson, White Pine, Golden Oak, and Hackmatack Awards. She won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for The Thought of High Windows. She lives in Vineland, Ontario, with her husband, Michael, a composer, and her two shelties.