This time Nim’s the fish-out-of-water as she stows away on a cruise ship to save her kidnapped sea lion friend. Accompanied by her likeable iguana, Fred, the island girl lands with a splash in Manhattan, on the run from of a very Bad Guy, and on her way to reunite with her friend, cowardly adventure novelist Alex Rover. Kids who are interested in animals and animal welfare will enjoy this warmhearted story’s combo of suspenseful high-seas happenings, New York City excitement, and family drama. Grade 2–5—A brief prologue introduces Nim, a self-reliant girl, and her father, Jack, who live on an otherwise uninhabited island. They are joined by Alexandra Rover, a shy adventure writer who travels there to answer Nim's emailed call for help and decides to stay. As this sequel to Nim's Island (Knopf, 2001) opens, Alex and Nim have a quarrel, and she impulsively decides to depart with the supply plane. Before a repentant Nim can tell her father the bad news, Selkie, her sea lion friend, is kidnapped and taken aboard a cruise ship belonging to Troppo Tourists, a company with which Nim and Jack have had several bad encounters. The girl, accompanied by Fred, a marine iguana, swims out and is taken aboard the ship by two employees who assume she is part of a group of snorkelers. There she discovers Selkie imprisoned in a room with other exotic animals that the company's leader plans to sell illegally. With the help of two friendly kids, she comes up with a scheme to rescue the captives. In the end, Nim, Alex, and a very worried Jack all meet up in New York City for a happy ending. The protagonist's upbeat, unflappable affability is convincing enough to carry her through all manner of far-fetched scenarios and coincidences, and readers will happily take the trip right along with her. The line illustrations scattered throughout the book mirror the appealingly breezy and friendly tone of the text.— Eva Mitnick, Los Angeles Public Library Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Starred Review, Kirkus Reviews , March 1, 2008: "[An] equally winning sequel ... casting Nim, Jack and Alex into adventures that are exciting but never more than briefly scary, the author expertly shepherds the impulsive trio all the way to the Big Apple." Wendy Orr wrote her very first draft of Nim’s Island at age nine. An action-packed sequel, Nim at Sea, brings Nim to an even bigger island, when the intrepid island girl stows away on a cruise ship bound for Manhattan. Wendy Orr is also the author of Peeling the Onion, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. In a palm tree, on an island, in the middle of the wide blue sea, is a girl. Nim's hair is wild, her eyes are bright, and around her neck she wears three cords. One is for a spyglass, one is for a whorly, whistling shell, and the other holds a fat red pocketknife in a sheath. With the spyglass at her eye, Nim watched the little red seaplane depart. It sailed out through the reef to the deeper dark ocean, bumping across the waves till it was tossed into the bright blue sky. Then it rose so high and so far it was nothing but a speck, and floated out of sight. "Alex is gone," Nim told Fred. Fred stared at the coconuts clustered on the trunk. Fred is an iguana, spiky as a dragon, with a cheerful snub nose. He was sitting on Nim's shoulder, and he cared more about coconuts than he did about saying goodbye. (Marine iguanas don't eat coconut, but no one has ever told Fred.) As Nim threw three ripe coconuts thump! into the sand, she remembered Alex saying, "I never knew anything could taste better than coffee!" the first time Nim opened a coconut for her. Nim looked down at her father, sitting like a stone on Selkie's Rock. Jack's head was bowed and his shoulders slumped. Nim had never seen him look so sad. And suddenly she knew she'd made a terrible, terrible mistake. The mistake began when she answered Alex's very first e-mail, back when she'd thought that the famous Alex Rover was a man and a brave adventurer like the hero in the books "he" wrote. That led to Alex's ending up on the island--and when she did, Jack and Nim wanted her never to leave. Sometimes it felt good to be three instead of two. But other times Nim wanted Jack just for herself, the way it used to be. Or she wanted Alex just for herself, because Alex was her friend before she was Jack's. Sometimes, when Alex and Jack told Nim to go to sleep while they talked late into the night, Nim felt left out and lonely. Then, earlier this morning, the little red seaplane had arrived, bringing all the things that Alex had asked her editor back in the city to send. It was the first time a plane had ever landed on Nim's island. Nim could tell that Jack was worried that the pilot would notice how beautiful the island was and would want to come back again and again. Whenever Jack was worried, Nim was too. And when Nim was worried, so were her friends Selkie and Fred. (Selkie is a sea li