"The Sea of the Dead"

Barry Wolverton has been writing for children for over 20 years, helping create books, documentary television, and online content for Discovery Networks, National Geographic, the Library of Congress, Scholastic, and Time-Life Books, among others.

His debut novel, Neversink, was named the Children’s Book of Choice by Literacy Mid-South for their Read Across America program in 2014.

Wolverton applied the Page 69 Test to The Sea of the Dead, his latest novel in The Chronicles of the Black Tulip, and reported the following:

As it happens, page 69 in The Sea of the Dead is the opening of Chapter 7: “The Queen of Cashmere.” It begins:

Archibald Black stared at the girl with the uncommonly green eyes, and she in turn stared at him. They were sitting face-to-face in an ornate, vaulted room that completely defied Black’s expectations. He and David Owen had been led by Prester Thaddeus down a dark alley to an unmarked door, and when the girl let them in, they had passed through a crumbling corridor that reeked of garbage and twitched with rats.

This is a critical point in the book, and also a bridge between The Dragon’s Gate and The Sea of the Dead, the final two books in the trilogy. One of the unresolved plot points at the end of book 2 was, will David Owen (father of the protagonist, Ben Owen) and Archibald Black (Bren’s friend and a father figure) ever reunite with Bren after their ill-planned rescue attempt? They have escaped capture by the army of Mogul emperor Akbar in India, but now they find themselves in Cashmere, where their problems are about to get worse. That’s because they have crossed paths with book 3’s two new main characters, a woman named Shveta and an unusual young girl in her care named Ani. Shveta claims she is descended from the last authentic ruler of Cashmere, before the Mogul invasion, and believes it is her destiny to restore independence to Cashmere and rule as its queen. The way David Owen and Archibald Black extricate themselves from the pickle they find themselves in turns out to be a key to bringing all the main characters from all three books back together.

Visit Barry Wolverton's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Vanishing Island.

My Book, The Movie: The Sea of the Dead.

Writers Read: Barry Wolverton.

--Marshal Zeringue