He’s still looking for more work, though, and local gentlemen pay him for odd jobs here and there. Eel used to make his living as a “mudlark,” scavenging scrap from the banks of the Thames, but these days he is more gainfully employed as the “boy-of-all-work” at the Lion Brewery. On top of that, Eel is paying board for his little brother Henry, to keep him out of Fisheye Bill’s clutches. Eel’s stepfather, the notorious ne’er-do-well Fisheye Bill Taylor, is looking for him, demanding money, and Eel is trying to save up enough to pay Fisheye Bill off for good. The novel is set in 1854, a hot summer in London, “as if the sun were a giant who’d aimed his moist, stinky breath on all of us.” Eel, who narrates the story, is desperate for money. John Snow to prove that cholera is spread by contaminated water and not, as had previously been believed, “bad air.” As well as an adventure plot and a historical setting, the novel offers an introduction for young readers to the methodology of scientific investigation. The titular Eel is an orphan boy in Victorian London, who becomes involved in the (real, historical) quest of Dr. (Oct.The Great Trouble: A Mystery of London, the Blue Death, and a Boy Called Eel is a 2013 YA novel by American author Deborah Hopkinson. Snow and Eel’s deadline looms, and Eel’s past closes in on him, readers will feel the same sense of urgency-and excitement-as the characters themselves.

Hopkinson (Titanic: Voices from the Disaster) adeptly recreates the crowded, infested streets of London, but it’s her distinct, layered characters and turbulent, yet believable plot that make this a captivating read. Snow, have a different theory-that it’s being spread through a local water pump-which they set out to prove before the death toll escalates further. When the first cholera case hits, the town blames the polluted air, but Eel and his mentor, Dr. Eel, a hardworking and bighearted kid with no shortage of crummy luck, is being hunted by a notoriously mean crook, who happens to be his stepfather. Set amid the 1854 London cholera outbreak, Hopkinson’s attention-grabbing story of Eel, an orphan who survives by combing the filthy banks of the Thames for anything he might sell, is a delightful combination of race-against-the-clock medical mystery and outwit-the-bad-guys adventure.

The Great Trouble by Deborah Hopkinson