I AM CANADA: The Lost Franklin Expedition

This is one of those books that I learned a lot from, because I had never heard of this expedition before.

An expedition to explore the Northwest Passage, led by John Franklin, departed England in 1845. The two ships still have not been found.

This book is unusual in that it's mostly fiction. The names of the characters were real people, but no one can know exactly what happened or when, since every single man died and even the ships have never been found. In that way, it's more like the Royal Diaries, which work from the sometimes small amount of information we have on the royal personages. This one is far more modern than most of them, but it's an incident we have sadly little information on.

The story at the beginning is less interesting, because it's a lot of teenage boy on a ship stuff, but as the expedition progresses, it becomes better, though ultimately very tragic.

The author also wrote one of the first three I Am Canada books, Shot at Dawn, about WWI. I think he did quite a good job with this, although it rather depends if you like your historical fiction leaning very heavily toward fiction.