Pacific Express, tome 1 : Terreur sur ligne d'acier

La série PACIFIC EXPRESS et TERREUR SUR LA LIGNE D'ACIER : « Life is rough for orphan in Wild West (For kids, en Français). Life is not easy for a boy growing up in Canada's Wild West in the 1880s, and Luke MacAllan's life is particularly difficult. At 11, he has already lost his mother to scurvy. His father, overcome by sorrow, has decided to take Luke out west to find work on the Canadian Pacific Railway. They head to the Rockies, where they find work on a crew whose job it is to find the shortest, surest passages for the railway. Luke's father is a surveyor, charged with the dangerous task of assessing the stability of areas that have been recently dynamited. One day, Luke watches in horror as his father and another surveyor are buried alive in a rock slide. Now Luke is an orphan, overcome with sorrow. One night around the workers' campfire, Luke makes the mistake of trying whiskey. Stumbling through town drunkenly, he comes upon a dead body and is then arrested by two unsavory police officers who accuse him of murder. Luke is thrown in jail briefly. He then learns of a plot to bomb a railway tunnel and he and his only friend, a young Chinese orphan named Ti-Khuan, have to step up to save the day. This chapter book, the first in a new series called Pacific Express, is certainly not for the faint of heart. The bad guys are thoroughly bad and even the good guys are far from perfect. But for kids 8 to 10 (and older for those for whom French is a second language) who like adventure stories, it is an intriguing glimpse into Canada's history, and into the lives of thousands of poor boys and men, many of them underpaid Chinese immigrants, who built this country's railway by hand. ” (Michelle Lalonde, THE GAZETTE, Montréal, 17 septembre 2011)