Avi writes:

I love to read history because I love good stories. Dates are interesting—it’s helpful to know when things happened—but it’s the stories of people doing the most amazing things, things that often change the world, that grab my imagination. In these books I have set out to tell tales of history in such a way that they come alive with “real” young people in “real” situations. And Hollywood could not invent the amazing and truly thrilling facts that pertain to the Monitor and the Merrimac, and the Civil War battle they fought, the first time iron ships clashed. Here’s a book that almost wrote itself. Most amazing is the fact that it’s all true.