Also includes sites with a short overview, synopsis, book report, or summary of Janet Taylor Lisle’s Black Duck. Read Time: 4 hours Full Book Notes and Study Guides Sites like SparkNotes with a Black Duck study guide or cliff notes.

Julia Ward Howe Young Readers Finalist, 2007īulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Big Picture selectionĬopyright 1999-, Janet Taylor Lisle. Black Duck by Janet Taylor Lisle Genre: Historical Fiction Pages: 240 Est.

Rhode Island Book of the Year, 2007 (Alliance for the Study and Teaching of Adolescent Literature, Rhode Island College) Her answers, emailed from her home on the Rhode Island coast, shed light on how she came to write the story, and some of the means she used to bring the past to life. It’s a place where conventional rules of right and wrong no longer apply, as loyalty turns into betrayal, and betrayal becomes a way of upholding the law.īooksellers Baker and Taylor interviewed Janet Lisle about her novel Black Duck. Ruben and his friend Jeddy are drawn into a dark world of subterfuge. Soon after, a dead body in an evening suit washes up on the beach. Then Ruben catches the speedster landing an illegal load of liquor late one night on an abandoned dock. Her skipper is too smart and her crew too skilled. The outlaw rum-running boat is half phantom, known up and down the Rhode Island coast for her daring exploits, yet rarely glimpsed by ordinary folk. Like everyone in town, Ruben Hart has heard about the Black Duck. As it swung around into the dazzle of headlights, I caught sight for the first time of the ship’s name, painted along the starboard bow. He revved the powerful engines, idled them, and with an expert hand, allowed the boat to drift into position. The wheelman was a young man, dark and dashing as a pirate. Black Duck paints the problem of belief in Truth, the Always-Right kind, in starker colors. “ The rumrunner craft approached the dock again.