#17--Around the World by Matt Phelan

Each year I have been a librarian I have had the pleasure and privilege to attend the annual PSLA (Pennsylvania School Librarian Association) conference in the spring.  This year was no different.  Each year there is both an author and an illustrator featured during the conference.  This year's illustrator was Matt Phelan, who has written and illustrated several graphic novels/nonfiction works.  I purchased two of them, with Around the World being one of them.

Around the World follows three real-life adventurers on their trips around the world.  Before reading this book I was only familiar with Nellie Bly, who is most famous for her stunt journalism (including her trip around the world in an attempt to beat Jules Verne's fictional character Phileas Fogg and an expose she wrote after she faked insanity and was placed in a mental institution so she could write about the abuses happening from within).

The second adventurer (he appears first in the book) is Thomas Stevens.  Stevens is a miner, but he does not enjoy his work.  As the bicycle is first introduced to American culture (a new-fangled contraption that many did not believe would last), Stevens quits his job and decides to ride his bicycle around the world.  In an effort to have a sponsor pay for his trip, he offers to chronicle his adventures.  (He eventually does do this, but he does not get sponsorship right away.)

The third, and final, adventurer is Joshua Slocum, a retired sea captain who fixes up a dilapidated little boat to sail around the world in.  It takes him several years to do this.  Once he has completed his adventure he eventually climbs back into his boat and sails off, never to be heard from again.

All three of these individuals, Bly, Stevens, and Slocum, wrote accounts of their adventures that were published.  It was these accounts that inspired the author to create this work.  Phelan's illustrations are of water colors that tend to be washed-out...despite this, they are expressive and beautiful in their own right.  I am looking forward to reading my second purchase of Phelan's Storm in the Barn, as well as his newest release coming out later this month, Bluffton: My Summer With Buster Keaton.  

Despite the fact that the book comes in at 240 pages, I was able to finish it in about a half an hour.  So, it is a quick and easy read.

Happy Reading!!