This book is a 2006 Cybil Award Nominee for YA Fiction.
One bright morning in 1904, fifteen-year-old Mallory boards the General Slocum, a steamship on the East River of New York. The ship routinely puffs serenely between lower Manhattan and Long Island, New York, and all aboard are full of the excitement of their day. Mallory and her family are off to a picnic on Long Island with the rest of the members of St. Mark’s Lutheran church. They are mainly German, and where they live in lower Manhattan is then called Little Germany.
Mallory is full of thoughts of her beau, Dustin, and their first kiss, which they will soon share. When the steamship catches fire and goes down, Mallory, now dead, can still only grieve for the beautiful, perfect boy she lost, and for the rest of her family who is left behind.
More than a thousand people died that summer day in New York in 1904. This is an unique telling of another American tragedy that depicts a turn-of-the-century America filled with racial intolerance, harsh working conditions, love and death, corruption and life. Fans of ghosts being haunted by lost loves and The Unresolved historical mysteries will appreciate this one.
