This poorly written novel follows trouble-making Adam as he gets apprenticed to a shipping merchant and then proceeds to do everything possible to ruin his own life, his family's life, and the shipping merchant's life. The book is written at the reading level of fourth or fifth grade, but the subject material (the shipping merchant calmly explains why he is smuggling and why he is a good man and everyone is happy when he escapes arrest, there are constant references to his mother being a prostitute, Adam is kidnapped and left for dead on an island) is a little more mature, leaving me to wonder if Whitford is a simpleton or has no concept of her audience. This lackluster adventure was a failure through and through.