Schooner - by Pat Lowery Collins (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Acclaimed children's author Pat Lowery Collins chronicles the generations-old art of shipbuilding and the extraordinary construction of a modern day schooner. Through the magic of memory and artistic imagination, a young boy sees it all unfolding once again. And through his diary and in Collins's brilliant paintings, Schooner tells the tale of shipwrights in action and of the young boy who watched and helped as the mighty vessel rose from keel to spars.

Review Quotes

Martha Bennett Stiles

5.0 out of 5 stars

SCHOONER, written and illustrated by Pat Lowery Collins, is clear, intelligent, and useful; beautifully and intelligently illustrated and gracefully written. A contemporary youth engagingly describes the building of a schooner from laying her keel to launching her, making unfamiliar terms easy to grasp. What it took to construct these vessels when most of them were built, that is, in the centuries before power tools, also is part of the story.Any school or public library would do well to acquire SCHOONER, and surely it is a must for any library within fifty miles of a coast.

Goodreads Review

The building of the schooner Thomas E. Lannon as seen through the eyes of a boy, this charming children's book chronicles the extraordinary construction of a great sailing vessel. In the late 1990s, the legendary shipyards of Essex, Massachusetts, buzzed as they had a century before: Under the guiding hand of Harold Burnham, whose family has crafted boats in Essex for generations, the schooner Thomas E. Lannon was built. It was patterned after the nineteenth-century vessel Nokomis, one of the last large engineless schooners to fish off the Grand Banks.

32 pages.