BookBright
ABOUT THE BOOK
NO SPOILERSJin Haldar is eighteen and barely keeping her late father's run-down inn, the Admiral Bhargav Hotel, open on Coconino Bay in Southern Arizona, five hundred years after the clouds fused into a permanent shell and the rain started falling every day. Now that she is of age, Jin owes the Navy a conscription tax of two ounces of gold a month, and if she can't pay, she will serve three years in the Pacific while her fourteen-year-old sister, Thara, is taken from their parentless home. So Jin breaks the vow she made after her father died on a wrecking dive and freedives into the bay at midnight. When she gets back, a hulking drifter woman who won't give her name is waiting on the stoop. The stranger pays in thick gold coins stamped Treasure Island and can't stop staring at the family's two atmospheric diving suits, which only Jin's thumb can unlock. Months later the lodger offers Jin five hundred gold coins to dive with her in Vegas-Drowned. Thara wants in, and Jin, who doesn't trust the lodger an inch, decides that if her sister goes, she is going too. Then Jin's ex-boyfriend Taim, newly in the Coast Guard, arrives with his friend Saanvi, and the lodger makes her real pitch, a sealed vault she claims holds fifty thousand gold coins, deep inside a drowned casino tower in Vegas-Drowned.
Free Battle of the Books questions for Into the Sunken City
SPOILERSEvery one of these has the same answer, and that is the point. In a real battle the question is read aloud with a dozen other books in play, and students have a few seconds to place it. Here is what a battle might ask about Into the Sunken City. Use them as a quiz, a trivia round, or BOTB practice.
Where in the book they come from
- Early in the book
In what book does a freediver kill an eight-foot moray coiled around her legs with a saber?
✓ Answer
Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
On the way up from the drowned house, Jin pushes through a swath of kelp until a huge California moray grips her monofin and winds two loops around her legs. With no other way out, she slides the sheath off the saber she just found and kills the eel, nicking her own thigh in the swing.
- First half
In what book does a grillman with a silver bionic foot steal an atmo suit in a handbarrow?
✓ Answer
Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
While Bhili and the sisters eat calamari on Tonto Island, a grillman tells Bhili a colossal squid ripped off his foot on a Navy tour and says that now he cooks up their cousins. Then he knocks Bhili and Jin down and races off with one of the sisters' two atmo suits, until trawler captain Luz blows her whistle and her huge fishing hand Renato clips him across the ribs.
- First half
In what book does Once-Havasu glow blue from mushrooms covering its roads and buildings?
✓ Answer
Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
After about fifteen minutes of sinking, Jin looks down at 3,400 feet and sees Once-Havasu glowing blue across its roads, buildings, cars, and streetlamps. She first guesses the glow is plankton, but it turns out to be fungi spread across most of the drowned town.
- Second half
In what book do two sisters escape a laundry by ramming a corsair with a washing machine?
✓ Answer
Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
After supper Izzy shuts the sisters in the laundry, so Jin bars the door with a broken clothing rod and wrenches the pipes loose. When Izzy steps inside, Jin and Thara drive the huge machine straight into her and pin her against the passageway wall.
- Second half
In what book does a ten-year-old boy clean an inn each afternoon to stay there after school?
✓ Answer
Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
On the Bandeira, Taim reminds Jin how his Auntie Ximena arranged for him to clean the inn after school until she got off work. A few months in, Jin's dad took him diving at Once-Scottsdale after promising Ximena he would protect him like his own son.
- Near the end
In what book does a corsair pocket a gold coin from a stairwell step as a lucky charm?
✓ Answer
Into the Sunken City by Dinesh Thiru
Inside Center Stairwell A, Cao picks up a gold coin stamped with a grizzled parrot and the words Treasure Island, just like the ones Bhili paid with. Silva warns the crew not to stop for every glint of gold, but Cao pockets it anyway.
