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Booktalking Colorado Full Record:
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Title: |
The Man Who Was Poe |
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Author: |
Avi |
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Date Published: |
1989 |
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Genre: |
Mystery |
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Grade Level: |
6 - 8 |
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Booktalker: |
Bonnie Phinney |
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Booktalk:
The old city lay dark and cold. It is night. And Edmund is alone. His mother is gone. His aunt, who went in search of her, is dead. His sister has disappeared. Edmund has no one.
No one, that is, except…the mysterious stranger who follows him through the shadowy city. Part mystery, part historical fiction, The Man Who Was Poe, reads more like a novel by Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle (Sherlock Holmes) than your average young adult book.
The stranger’s name is Auguste Dupin – at least that who he says he is. He offers to help Edmund find his mother and father, and to unravel the mystery of the disappearance of his sister. But, unfortunately, his help comes with a price. You see, this stranger, Dupin, needs the boy’s help with a mission of his own, but Edmund doesn’t know this, at least not at first. Edmund agrees warily to the offer of help, but doesn’t trust the man at all. One moment, you see, Dupin is brilliantly perceptive, capable of dazzling detective work (like his namesake, the main character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue”). But the next moment he’s drunk, unintelligible, insensitive to Edmund’s plight. Is he mad, Edmund wonders? The man himself even admits, “If it is madness to see ghosts…then…I AM mad.”
Trust a madman, this stranger, who is obsessed with death? Edmund has no choice. But as the days and the hours wear on, Edmund begins to wonder if he has made a big mistake. Is Dupin, or whoever the stranger is, less interested in solving the mystery … than in prolonging it?? Would Dupin prefer his sister dead in order to give life to the tale he is writing? Sometimes it seems that way. Edmund needs Dupin, the detective, but not Dupin, the madman, to get to the truth before it’s too late.
The Man Who Was Poe: more than a murder puzzle: it’s a mystery about Edgar Allan Poe himself.
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