Titanic poetry

I am on a roll with these TAYSHAS books. I just finished The Watch that Ends the Night by Allan Wolf. It's a book of free verse poetry written about the sinking of Titanic in 1912. I don't usually like poetry, which is ironic since I am an English teacher, but I didn't mind this.

I do love historical fiction, and this book fit that genre nicely. The poems are written by all manner of beings, from the iceberg the ship hit, to ship rats, to passengers, and those working on the ship. This book tells the story, beginning to end of Titanic. It references the building of the ship, and the lives of those on the ship prior to boarding the ship all the way through the sinking of the ship, and making their way to New York. I went ahead and read the notes section too so I could learn a bit more about the characters I was reading about. Being fiction, the author took some liberties, but they were seamless, and I only know about them because the author tells the reader in his notes where some of the falsehoods lie.

Reading the different points of view opened up Titanic in a whole new way for me. The sinking of the ship is still depressing to me, and my heart hurts for all the lives lost. Reading this book brought it all back. Still, it was a good book, and I am glad I read it.