Publisher’s Weekly, Starred – (Ages 12-up)

“‘I require two years of your life, Mateo Macias de Avila. Two years that I cannot say will be easy, for we go to a destination unknown.’ With those words, Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan’s master-at-arms recruits a penniless 14-year-old orphan as cabin boy. Narrator Mateo sets off the summer of 1519 from Spain on the historic search for a ‘westward passage’ to the Spice Islands. Launched with dreams of riches and glory, they soon discover that life at sea is dangerous and unpredictable. Mateo grows to manhood while learning the often bitter lessons of loyalty, friendship, honor and ‘the courage of endurance,’ through seasickness and storms, the sweet taste of first love, a brutal winter at the tip of Cape Horn, hostile natives and a stint as a castaway, as well as tensions in the armada that explode into bloody mutiny. ‘I have been forged with fire,’ he says upon his return to Spain-one of only 18 that survived of the expedition’s original 277 men. Torrey’s absorbing narrative, with its appealingly clipped, slightly formal cadence, suits the period. She describes crew members suffering from scurvy and starvation (“Some men were mere bones, thumping the deck whenever they rolled over, a hollow clacking, sticks upon a drum”) and the night sky (“stars white as salt”) with equal ease. Drawing on 16th-century journals for historical detail, Torrey deftly maintains the taut thread of adventure that, along with the cast of memorable characters, keep the pages turning.”

Kirkus Reviews – (Historical fiction. 12+)

It’s 1519 and the plague has struck Spain. Mateo Macías de Ávila buries his parents, burns his farm, and sets out with his dog, Ugly, looking for a future. In an old inn reeking of smoke and half-drunken men, Mateo meets a recruiter and signs away two years of his life for a voyage to an unknown destination. Mateo meets Rodrigo Nieto, who tells him, “If we are lucky, half of us will return. It is the way of the sea. And that, my friend, is what I call adventure.” As cabin boy, cook, musician, and artist, Mateo is indeed in for an adventure. Sailing under Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese captain swearing allegiance to King Carlos of Spain, Mateo and Rodrigo hear stories of two-headed monsters, cannibals, and sea monsters standing between them and the riches of the Spice Islands. In their bid to sail west to get to the Far East and return home by circumnavigating the globe, Mateo and his fellow voyagers experience murder, mutiny, marooning, starvation, beautiful native women, a forest of ghosts, menacing seawolves, and a graveyard of mummified giants. Young readers will be entranced by Torrey’s descriptions of starving sailors eating maggots, rats, leather, and sawdust, and of executions and bloody warfare. The writing is lively; readers will feel as if they have been right there with Mateo on one of the greatest voyages of discovery ever. This deserves to be in the hands of every reader who loves history and adventure. (map, glossary, afterword, bibliography, bibliography for young readers)”

Mercury News

“Mateo Macias de Ávila is an orphan as well, but Michele Torrey’s ‘To the Edge of the World’ is no fanciful romp. Instead, Torrey spins a breathtaking, gritty adventure that leaves the reader feeling the salty spray of seawater and the desperate hunger of a belly too long empty. Left an orphan by the plague, Mateo finds his way into one of the great moments in history, Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe, beginning in 1519. Torrey gracefully writes about the voyage through the eyes of Mateo, a naive teenage cabin boy who grows both more worldly and wise as the voyage progresses. This is neither a simple nor a feel-good tale, but an intimate, realistic look at the ambitions, jealousies and other motivations that fueled the leaders of the voyage, the interactions the sailors had with native peoples, and the struggles and deprivations they endured. We see acts of both great cowardice and heroism, but what sets the book apart are its powerful depictions of what daily life on the voyage must have been like. Becalmed at sea, the Trinidad becomes ‘no longer a ship but an oven,’ writes Torrey. ‘Our rations for water, wine and bread were cut in half. The meat turned rotten and stank. Casks of wine exploded in the hold, bursting their staves. The wheat shriveled into nothing but husks. Sharks swarmed about our ships. Espinosa caught one and cooked it and offered me a chunk. I hated the taste of its flesh. It tasted like dead men.’ Hers is at times a brutal portrayal of a great adventure, not appropriate for younger readers who like to venture well above their grade level. But for older children, ‘To the Edge of the World’ represents the best sort of historical fiction. Torrey also offers helpful context in her afterword, a useful glossary and a bibliography.”