Stowaway
CBC Books | | Posted: May 29, 2020 4:19 PM | Last Updated: June 10, 2020
Pam Withers
Owen's plan to sail away on an adventure puts him on a collision course with some very dangerous people.
When Owen's parents leave him on his own for a week, the 16-year-old gets bored and hatches a crazy idea: sneak onto the yacht that's visiting the sleepy Pacific Coast island where he lives and stow away on an adventure! Once on board the vessel, Owen quickly finds this is anything but innocent fun. The ship is packed with teenagers from Central America, and it looks like Owen has stumbled into a people-smuggling operation.
Complications pile up and as things head from bad to worse, a haunting incident from Owen's past tightens its grip on him. There's only one way to break free and make his way home. Owen and the first mate, Arturo — a former street kid — must work together to commandeer the boat and win the trust of those on board. But who's friend and who's foe in the shifting tides? (From Dundurn Press)
From the book
I sit on our dock, the tips of my shoes in the frigid May water, forty-nine kinds of bored. Nothing ever happens around here. It's Dullsville without the ville.
I've devised a punishment for parents who move to an island so small that it doesn't even have a school. For starters, they should be wrapped in seaweed and left at low tide for jellyfish to sting and seagulls to guano-bomb.
There's no one close to my age on this entire three-mile-long, sea-locked lump of dirt and trees. I have to catch a water taxi (named The Scholarship, ha ha) to the nearest island with a high school, where I get treated like a redneck just 'cause the kids on that island are thirty-nine kinds of bored.
From Stowaway by Pam Withers ©2018. Published by Dundurn Press.