The Ship of Doom

By M.A.Bennett

This book was on the shortlist for my school’s annual competition – The Bolton Children’s Fiction Award. As I love historical fiction and have read some other books on the Titanic, picking up this book was an easy choice for me. If you want to know which other books were on this year’s shortlist – click here. To find out this year’s winner – follow me or read my review!

This is the first in the four book ‘Butterfly Club’ historical time-travel series. It is a mystery story set in Greenwich, London in 1894 during the reign of Queen Victoria. The Victorian Era is known as a great time in British history when the country had great power and wealth and there were many advances in technology. This creates a good background for this story.

All the books in the series are cleverly involve the butterfly effect. This a theory that any small change can make much bigger changes happen. This means that something small that occurs in one time can have a big impact on the future.

The main characters are three children: Luna, Konstantin, and Aiden. Luna is a sensible and clever girl. She loves to wear bright, pretty dresses but has been taught sciences unlike many other girls of that time. Konstantin was very ill for most of his childhood but despite this he is a happy boy. His brothers are all in the military and he does his best to act brave. The other boy, Aiden, had a tough childhood. Since the age of ten, he had been working as a labourer helping to build railways.

Luna has an aunt who is a member of ‘the butterfly club’ which has its meetings at the Greenwich Observatory. Luna thinks that it must be very boring until she discovers the club is actually a secret society who are able to time travel into the future to steal important inventions that they bring back to 1894. They then use them to advance the technology available in their own time. This could explain why there was so much development in Britain during the late Victorian Era.

In the story, the children’s challenge is to travel into the future to the year 1912 to find a man named Guglielmo Marconi (the real-life Italian engineer and inventor of the wireless radio). Luna and her friends find themselves on a huge ship which is travelling from Southampton to New York. Unfortunately for them, it turns out that the ship they are onboard is actually the RMS Titanic – the famous White Star Line passenger liner which sank after hitting an iceberg during its first voyage!

I read an interesting interview with the author of the book where she talks about Guglielmo Marconi. He was supposed to travel on the Titanic with his family but luckily for him, he ended up travelling on another ship, the Lusitania, instead. Marconi also has another link to this tragic story – one of his wireless radios was inboard the Titanic in the communication’s room. His invention was used to call the rescue ships which saved over 700 survivors.

I like the way that the author has woven her own story in with facts and actual historical figures which helps make it more believable and has you asking all kinds of questions. I will leave you to read the book so you can discover whether Luna, Konstantin and Aiden are able to achieve their task of finding Marconi and his invention and bringing it back to the Butterfly Club. I am also sure you will enjoy finding out whether the children’s actions during their visit to the future have an impact on the events of 1912.

My score: 4/5