Image Retrieved from:
"The Convicts (cover) | Canadian Children's Book Centre." If You Love Children’s Books, You’ve Come to the Right Place! | Canadian Children's Book Centre. The Canadian Children's Book Centre. Web. 12 Dec. 2011.
Click on the book cover to view an inside preview of the book on amazon.com!
"I had no wish to know this world, though I had been born by the banks of the Thames, where the river met the sea... the river had taken her father, and the sea had taken her two brothers, and ever since my sister's death she taught me to fear them both. I often thought- when I saw the Thames swirling by- that one or the other was waiting to take me too."
- The Convicts, Ian Lawrence, p. 4.
Tom Tin, the main character in this book, is an English boy growing up in a somewhat early London. His father is a captain, and his mother does nothing, she simply breathes and survives, ever since the death of his little sister, Kitty.
Everything Tom knows in the beginning in this book is poverty and a family torn apart by the sea and the bank. The readers of the book are never introduced to what Tom knew before, and it creates the feeling that this is all he knows, and how his life has always been.
He has been taught to fear the sea, despite the fact that his father is a sailor himself, and he does fear it very much.
Tom Tin has very few things, however, he loves them and cares for them very much. He really does feel the presence of "home" before it is all torn away from him as the events of the book unfold. Tom's feelings of his ordinary world remind me very much of the quotation from the film Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
"It's not much, but it's home," -Ron Weasley, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Image retrieved from:Darlene. "Its Not Much, But Its All I Have! (Original Date:10-28-2010) « TweetinGrandma's Blog." TweetinGrandma's Blog. 28 Oct. 2010. Web. 12 Dec. 2011.
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