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I know I should never judge a book by its cover, but I put off reading The Dolphin Crossing for a long time simply because I didn’t like the cover of the copy I had. Silly reason I know, especially since it turned out to be such a good book.

The Dolphin Crossing begins in the spring of 1940 and tells the story of two teenage boys from very different backgrounds and circumstances brought together because of the World War II. John Aston, 17, lives with his mother in a cottage on their seaside estate after the army requisitions their main house for the war effort. Pat Riley, 14, is a London evacuee living in an abandoned railroad coach in the middle of a cow pasture with his pregnant step-mom. Their paths cross when John stops a group of rowdy boys from picking on Pat after school and then walks him home. He stays and has tea, but he is clearly disturbed by the horrid living situation of the Rileys.

Later that day, John’s mother suggests they take a walk and John takes her over to meet the Rileys. Pat and John’s mothers hit it off immediately, as John suspected they would, especially since John has an ulterior motive for taking his mom there. Back home, he asks if they could make their empty stable habitable for the Rileys to live in. It takes a lot of work, but Pat knows something about carpentry and how to mix cement for a new floor. Cement could still be bought but sand for it couldn’t, so the boys decide to head to the beach at night and get the sand there. After returning home, Pat discovers he has lost the watch his dad had given him at the beach. That night, the boys go back to the beach to look for it and discover that Crossman, the man in charge of the nearby shipyard, is dealing in black market petrol.

Eventually, Pat and John finish converting the stable into a very pleasant place to live, with electricity, private sleeping quarters, bathroom and kitchen facilities and even a living room. Even Mrs. Aston helps out with curtains, furniture and baby things she had saved from her own sons. Mrs. Riley is surprised and happy with her new home, but goes into labor shortly after she and Pat move in.

Now, though, with their project finished, John has time on his hands and one day, while out, he notices a lot of small boats heading out to sea and can hear the sounds of bombs and guns across the channel in France. Figuring out what the boats are doing, John and Pat decide to join the flotilla, taking the Aston boat, the Dolphin, over to Dunkirk to try to save as many soldiers as possible. John blackmails Crossman into getting the boat ready for the trip by threatening to expose his black market scam. John is a very good sailor, but Pat had never even seen the sea until he was evacuated, let alone sail on it. Nevertheless, they make it to Dunkirk, where they make numerous trips ferrying soldiers from the beach to the waiting ship, the HMS Wakeful. Exhausted, they finally are forced to leave Dunkirk with a boatload of sailors and head back to England, but not before John sees the Wakeful torpedoed by a German U-boat. Feeling completely disheartened, John believes that all their work was for nothing:

A great gust of rage swept over John. All that work; the long day yesterday, the danger they had borne, the risks they has run, all for nothing. All so that those hundreds of soldiers could drown instead of being shot. (pg 116)

When they get back home, John takes the sailors to his mother’s house, believing s

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After the Germans did the very thing that no one expected them to do, entering France from the north through Belgium instead of trying to cross the well fortified Maginot Line, they were able to trap British Expeditionary Force (BEF) on beaches of Dunkirk. Operation Dynamo was immediately organized to evacuate the BEF using small fishing and pleasure boats to ferry the soldiers from the beach to larger ships anchored a little further out to sea.

Louise Borden has written a lovely children’s book describing the evacuation from the point of view of a young girl, whose name we never learn, living in a coastal town in southern England called Deal. Her father, Martin Gates, owns a fishing boat named the Lucy and her older brother John is off fighting in somewhere in France.

When the call goes out for people to register their boats for the evacuation, she puts on one of her father’s fishing caps, her brother’s patched old fishing trousers and goes with her father to register for the rescue.

First, the two of them sail the Lucy to Ramsgate, where they join an armada of other small boats. Then, father and daughter head across the English Channel to Dunkirk, pulled by towropes attached to the bigger ships. Arriving in Dunkirk, they ferry boatload after boatload of soldiers from the beach to the ships, always keeping an eye out for her brother John. And even though they ask the soldiers about him, no one can give them any information.

Finally, they are forced to go back to Dover, England because their little boat is running out of fuel. On the way back, the Lucy come under fire by German planes. Their boat is hit a few times by bullets and begins taking on water, so the soldiers must continuously bail out the water with their helmets while father and daughter sail the Lucy home.

When they reach Dover, they continue making inquires about John, but still no one has any information. In the end, they return to Deal with a small black and white dog that had come over with on of the soldiers. The dog is named Smokey Joe, which is the name for a coal-burning minesweeper, the Lucy followed going to Dunkirk.

This is a small, but powerful story of Dunkirk. The anonymous narrator keeps the story focused on the heroes and events she is describing and deflects it from herself, yet it is still a personal story. Her descriptions are an interesting contrast to the beautiful watercolor illustrations done by Michael Foreman, one of my favorite children’s book illustrators. The rescued dog Smoky Joe is a red thread throughout the story. He is first visible in one of the earlier illustrations of the soldiers clutching him while still on the beach just before being rescued. Later, the dog and soldier are depicted being pulled out of the water and onto the safety of the Lucy. And again, the last picture of the narrator, still on the Lucy and holding the dog. The dog is a symbol of success and hope and even though they never find information regarding the whereabouts of John Gates, the dog represents the hope that he will come home too.


There is an Author’s Note at the back of the book th

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The books are based on a simple enough premise. In 2060 Oxford, history is studied by traveling back in time to observe, collect data and interpret events firsthand under the tutelage of Mr. Dunworthy, the history professor in charge of time travel. The story centers on three students interested in different aspects of World War II. Michael Davies, disguised as Mike Davis who wants to go to Dover as an American war correspondent to observe the heroism of the ordinary people who rescued British soldiers from Dunkirk; Merope Ward becomes Eileen O’Reilly, working as a servant to Lady Caroline Denewell in her manor at Backbury, Warwickshire in order to observe evacuees from London; and Polly Churchill becomes Polly Sebastian, a shop girl by day working in the fictitious department store Townsend Brothers on Oxford Street, who wants to observe how Londoners coped during the Blitz.

In Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis makes it clear that there are certain cardinal rules of time travel. First, the traveler may not do anything to alter a past event. But that kink was supposed to be taken care of so that it couldn’t happen. In addition, an historian is not allowed to travel to a divergence point, a critical point in history that can be changed by the presence of the historian. Nor can a predetermined drop site open if t

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