This is the true story of a 17-year boy from New York’s Lower East Side who stowed away on a 1928 scientific expedition to Antarctica and realized his dream.

In 1928, Richard Evelyn Byrd, runner up to Charles Lindbergh for the first New York-to-Paris flight, conceived of an expedition to Antarctica, desperate for a second chance to take his place in history. The rich and powerful begged to go along but it is a 17-year-old immigrant kid from New York who jumped into the Hudson River the night before Bryd’s ship sailed.

Billy Gawronski was desperate to escape a dreary future in the family upholstery business and took the leap to a new adventure. From the rowdy dance halls of Panama to sultry Francophone Tahiti, all the way to the first American village on the frozen bottom of the world, Shapiro paints a breathless portrait of a reckless, optimistic era when three-masted sailing ships and dog-sleds co-existed with newfangled airplanes. And when an out-of-luck aviator and a 17-year-old stowaway looking to prove themselves carried the hopes of so many yearning to do the same.

The book has everything you’re looking for in a great adventure story: an evocative era, larger-than-life characters, more than a dash of danger, and a feel-good moral about taking risks to live your dreams.

Laurie Gwen Shapiro is an American writer and filmmaker. She resides in New York City, where she was born and raised, and is a graduate of that city’s renowned Stuyvesant High School. The 2001 documentary film Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale, which she co-produced and co-directed with her brother David, received numerous awards. Her semi-autobiographical first novel, The Unexpected Salami, was named an ALA Notable Books in 1998.