Victory by Susan Cooper

At the end of this book, Cooper writes "Sam Robbin's encounters with Admiral Nelson are not historical; they come out of my imagination, and I loved writing them. Perhaps I wrote this whole book only for the chance of meeting one of my greatest heroes, just as I was lucky enough to  meet Shakespeare in a book called King of Shadows and Merlin, long ago, in a sequence called The Dark is Rising. Writers are fortunate people. "


I love these thoughts! Writing does seem very much, to me, not only like meeting the characters in your story, but living with them for a short while.  I've never thought to put it into words like that before, but Cooper's done it beautifully...

And I loved Victory too - it's the story of two children, Sam Robbins who was ship's boy on the HMS Victory when Nelson won his Battle of Trafalgar, and Molly Jennings who finds a rather special book one wet day in Mystic Seaport, thousands of miles away in America, where she doesn't really want to be. Of course there is a connection between Sam and Molly, and the stories run beautifully parallel and somehow together at the same time, until we find out just what that connection is.

I liked Victory much more than Kingdom of Shadows - I wonder if Cooper likes to bring England and America together in her stories now because she has herself married an American and moved to set up a new life there?  (I'm sure this has been thoroughly discussed elsewhere, maybe even by SC, but I shall speculate anyway... *g*)  Somehow I didn't quite get the American connection in Kingdom of Shadows, it seemed a bit contrived perhaps, but it makes sense in Victory, it feels right somehow - we know who Molly is, and her stepbrother and father seem absolutely American, and the connection worked.  It made sense, too, that Sam Robbin's book might end up in an American seaport, and yet call out to an English girl, both of them taken far away from home when they were children. 

And of course you could feel the sea and the spray and the rain and smell the underdecks of the Victory, and as I read along it really was like meeting all those characters - all those people.  Just like being there - my favourite kind of book!