Looking for Marco Polo

Newbery Honor–winning author Alan Armstrong’s latest book!

Eleven-year-old Mark's anthropologist father has disappeared in the Gobi desert while tracing Marco Polo’s ancient route from Venice to China. His mother decides they must go to Venice to petition the agency that sent Mark’s father to send out a search party. Anxious about his father and upset about spending Christmas away from home, Mark gets a bad asthma attack in the middle of the night. That’s when Doc Hornaday, an old friend of Mark’s father, makes a house call, along with a massive black Tibetan mastiff called Boss. To distract Mark from his wheezing and to pass the long Venetian night, the Doc starts to spin for Mark the tale of Marco Polo. Doc describes Marco’s travels and the boy finds himself falling under the spell of the story that has transfixed the world for centuries. Marco’s journey bolsters Mark’s courage and whets his appetite for risk and adventure, and for exposure to life in all its immense and fascinating variety.


From the Hardcover edition.

ALAN ARMSTRONG went to China to see what Marco Polo might have seen, flying in one day the distance it took Marco three years to go by galley, camel, yak, horse, and foot, nearly at the cost of his life. Inspired by Polo's hunger for exploration and his gift for describing what he met, Armstrong wrote Looking for Marco Polo, his third book for children. His first book, Whittington, was awarded a Newbery Honor in 2006. He lives with his wife, Martha, a painter, in Massachusetts.