''Corby Flood'' is a 2005 children's book written by Paul Stewart and illustrated by

Chris Riddell Chris Riddell ( ) (born 13 April 1962) is a South African-born British illustrator and occasional writer of children's books and a political cartoonist for the '' Observer''. He has won three Kate Greenaway Medals - the British librarians' a ...

. It won the

Nestlé Children's Book Prize Nestlé S.A. (; ; ) is a Swiss multinational food and drink processing conglomerate corporation headquartered in Vevey, Vaud, Switzerland. It is the largest publicly held food company in the world, measured by revenue and other metrics, since ...

Silver Award.Nestlé Children's Book Prize

Plot summary

Corby Flood is an average girl in an average family. They are on board the SS ''Euphonia'', a giant cruise ship that used to be "the Empress of the Seas" but has since been reduced to a cargo ship with some passengers. The people aboard include her family, the captain, Lieutenant Letchworth-Crisp, a third engineer, Mr. and Mrs. Hattenswiller, The Man from Cabin 21, and the mysterious Brotherhood of Clowns. The Floods are traveling to Harbor Heights to start a new school for the children and, for Mr. Flood, a job designing umbrellas, as he was an engineer but had a "great disappointment" when a bridge he built collapsed. Corby must handle the annoying, smarmy Lieutenant who is overly interested in her older sister, cope with the antics of her four older brothers, and figure out the connection between the Brotherhood of Clowns and a sad, mournful tune – and she must make it back to the ship after getting shipped to a strange and foreign place wearing a bumblebee costume. Also some (if not all) the characters names are taken from names of

fonts In metal typesetting, a font is a particular size, weight and style of a typeface. Each font is a matched set of type, with a piece (a " sort") for each glyph. A typeface consists of a range of such fonts that shared an overall design. In mod ...

such as

Garamond Garamond is a group of many serif typefaces, named for sixteenth-century Parisian engraver Claude Garamond, generally spelled as Garamont in his lifetime. Garamond-style typefaces are popular and particularly often used for book printing and ...

Franklin Gothic Franklin Gothic and its related faces are a large family of sans-serif typefaces in the industrial or grotesque style developed in the early years of the 20th century by the type foundry American Type Founders (ATF) and credited to its head desi ...

Times Roman Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration wit ...

and

Palatino Palatino is the name of an Serif#Old-style, old-style serif typeface designed by Hermann Zapf, initially released in 1949 by the Stempel Type Foundry, Stempel foundry and later by other companies, most notably the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. ...

. Most font names were notably among the Brotherhood of clowns.

References

2005 British novels 2005 fantasy novels Children's fantasy novels British children's novels British fantasy novels Novels set on ships 2005 children's books Doubleday (publisher) books {{2000s-child-fantasy-novel-stub