Red Sails to Capri

We homeschool and used this book as a read aloud to a 2nd and 3rd grader. The first chapter was slow to them but then it really picked up with the mystery of the cove. The kids loved this book in the end and were so surprised to find out that Capri is real! Highly recommend. More for an upper elem. if read to one's self.

I read this story aloud to my family as we travelled through South Korea on the trains. The constant speaker changes were a wonderful challenge for me as an amateur actor--I rendered almost all of them with accents. As far as I can tell, everyone enjoyed it immensely (I even received appalause from the locals). For the past four years I've had a standing request from my wife to record it as an audiobook...would that I had the time. The tale recounts events surrounding the boy who discovered the Blue Grotto on the Isle of Capri in Italy, being roughly equal parts an adventure, inter-cultural, overcoming life's challenges, and coming-of-age story. I do not know if the story was pricinpally factual, historical fiction or entirely fabricated, but I do know that four years on, my children are still begging to visit Capri. I truly can't recommend this title highly enough. It's absolutely shocking to me that the book appears to be out-of-print. The copyright holder is sitting on a great resource. They should license it for others to print (or download) if they don't wish to print it themselves. NOTE TO WOULD BE NARRATORS AND PERFORMANCE READERTS: I strongly encourage you to pre-read the title with a pack of differntly colored highlighter markers. This will be a great help in getting your voices right. The dialogue moves quickly and, while the mistakes I made were either ignored or missed by my local Korea rail audience, both my children both commented something to the effect that Daddy needs to scan farther ahead.

I would heartily recommend this book to the 11 and 12 year old set. There are not a lot of books appropriate for that age level with the personality of the Red Sails to Capri. It was a bit difficult for even good fourth grade readers to get the nuances, so I would alternate reading pages with the students. That said, after reading the book, I myself want to sail off to Capri to see the island and of course, "the cave." Ann Weil does such a wonderful job of building the characters here from the Mama and Papa to the outgoing Angelo, and then the three travelers each in search of something different in life. And, the discussions we had about finding what we want in life by pursuing them were always interesting. This was one of my favorite books to use when I was teaching. It is not particularly easy reading, I certainly would recommend it wholeheartedly.

Red Sails to Capri is about a fourteen-year-old boy named Michele Pagano who lives on the island of Capri with his parents, who run a small mountainside inn. His best friends are Angelo, a fisherman, and a goat herder named Pietro. One day, three rich visitors-Lord Derby, Monsieur Jacques, and Herre Nordstrom-arrive on the island on a boat with red sails. Though each has come for different reasons-one for adventure, one for beauty, and the third for peace and quiet-all three become obsessed with the mystery behind a cove that the islanders fear so much they will not even speak of it. Despite the fears of Michele's mother, the three visitors, her husband, Michele, Pietro, and Angelo eventually visit the cove and discover, not monsters or cutthroat pirates, but a beautiful blue grotto. I am so glad I read this book. I finally took a look at it because of the Newbery Honor award-and because the cover asks, "Can three strangers, each on a separate quest, solve the mystery of the island?" I'm always hooked by the word "mystery," and Red Sails to Capri proved to be an unusual one. Weil had me dying to know what the mystery of the cove really was, but the book is short and I found myself wondering if it would actually be revealed as the number of pages left to be read grew smaller. She brings the book to a satisfying conclusion as the cove is discovered to be the site of a beautifully tinted grotto made by the light passing through the blue waters outside the cave's entrance. Weil does a lovely job of bringing her characters to life, but her most successful has to be Signora Pagano, Michele's "Mamma." She is excitable; she looks upon Angelo the fisherman with disdain because he likes to spin tales; but her trademark is the way she cooks-by talking to the food: "There, there," she says to some fish, "cook slowly now. Do not hurry yourselves." As Michele's father best explains it, "Does she cook by recipe? No. Does she cook by taste? No. Does she cook by smell? No . . . [She] takes a few fish, and she talks to them, and argues with them, and scolds them, and flatters them, until finally she talks them into cooking the way she wants them." Mamma Pagano is known as the best cook on Capri, and her characterization is charming. She "cooed to the fish, spoke harshly to the soup when it boiled over, and begged the figs to keep themselves juicy." Her cooking skills are illustrated in this way throughout the text, including her "soft-boiled-egg song." The song, performed correctly, yields perfect eggs. This is important, because one of the three guests has eaten two soft-boiled eggs every morning for nearly fifty years, and Signora Pagano makes perfect eggs for him. Later, when the men decide to discover the secret of the cove, Mamma wages the most powerful protest she can think of: she refuses to cook for them. This leads to a crisis at the inn, as Michele and his father attempt to duplicate her unusual cooking methods but only achieve di

I just loved this book. I haven't read it to the kids - it is too advanced for most 1-2nd graders to read themselves - and I'm not quite sure if they will enjoy the story or understand its humor and characterizations until they are 1 or 2 years older. The setting is a mountainside village in Capri, and it is wonderfully depicted. The book contains an easy-going adventure story and mystery - a supposedly haunted cove that three visitors to the island want to explore to the horror and dismay of the island residents. But the real strength of the book is in the warm and lively characterizations of the islanders, particularly the main protagonist, 14 year old Miguel, and the three visitors. Worth searching for this book. update 2009 -- I did read this to my children last year, and they LOVED it. I really played up accents (I"m sure I did a horrible job, but it was fun :) as I read it aloud, and the kids completely grasped the relationships and warmth and humor of this gem of a book. I do think in general kids of this generation prefer books with a stronger, more exciting plot line and might struggle to read this independently, but as a read-aloud, it really shines.