My daughter and I are reading For the Love of Venice together separately. I got it just for the Venice info, but it has some info on the MOSE project, which is a bonus.
In case you don’t happen to be familiar with the MOSE project (which I wasn’t until we recently saw a Discovery Channel show), it has as its goal the saving of the lagoon that surrounds Venice, Italy, by the strategic placement of barrier walls and floodgates. I think this paper, in .pdf format, probably explains the problem and the proposed solution the best — and with some illustrations.
I’m on page 72 of For the Love of Venice and so far we’ve got
- a main character who is high school boy (a senior) w/younger brother, mom, dad
- a main character who is a U.S. citizen visiting Venice for summer
- a dad who is a civil engineer working on the MOSE project
- a mother who is spacey artist
- a short discussion of subsidence of Venice and floodgates
- a short discussion of pollution of the lagoon
- description of life in Venice
- a girl in ice cream store who is probable romantic interest
- some graffiti and intrigue
So far, I think For the Love of Venice is fairly good. If you’ve got a trip to Venice in your future or you need an interesting novel to help with geography class, your children might enjoy it. It definitely gives the reader a feel for the place, and if you have a guidebook handy, you can look the places up on a map.