Product Description

Two children cross an ocean, two hundred years apart. One is Sam Robbins, a powder monkey aboard H.M.S.Victory, the ship in which Lord Nelson will die a hero's death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. The other is Molly Jennings, a present-day English girl transplanted from London to America, fighting a battle of her own against loss and loneliness. This extraordinary time-shifting adventure tells the interwoven stories of Sam and Molly, linked by a mystery. Sam is a farm boy, press ganged to serve in the Royal Navy. In the dangerous world of a warship enduring the Napoleonic Wars, he meets both cruelty and kindness, and survives a fearsome battle whose echoes reach through the years to involve Molly as well. Like him, she has lost her childhood but will find her future, with help from a very unexpected source. Two lives joined forever by the touch of Nelson, the greatest sailor of all time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #103471 in Books
• Published on: 2007-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From the Inside Flap
Sam Robbins is a farm boy, kidnapped and forced to serve aboard HMS Victory, Lord Nelson's ship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. At first Sam is terrified and seasick, but in the rowdy, dangerous world of a warship, he transforms himself into a sailor and survives a fearsome and bloody battle, the echoes of which reach through the years to touch Molly Jennings. She is a modern-day English girl forced to leave London and live with her new step-family in America, and she too is fighting a battle against loss and loneliness.
This extraordinary time-shifting adventure tells the interwoven stories of Sam and Molly, linked by a mystery. Two lives joined forever by the touch of Nelson, one of the greatest sailors of all time.

£8.99

From the Back Cover
Sam Robbins is a farm boy, kidnapped and forced to serve aboard HMS Victory, Lord Nelson's ship at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. At first Sam is terrified and seasick, but in the rowdy, dangerous warship, he transforms himself into a sailor and survives a fearsome and bloody battle, the echoes of which reach through the years to touch Molly Jennings. She is a modern-day English girl forced to live with her new step-family in America, and she too is fighting a battle against loss and loneliness.

This extraordinary time-shifting adventure tells the interwoven stories of Sam and Molly, linked by a mystery. Two lives joined for ever by the touch of Nelson, one of the greatest sailors of all time.

'A writer of great integrity and skill, whose influence and importance in the field of children's fantasy will be felt for a long time' PHILIP PULLMAN
'Susan Cooper hits top form with Victory' INDEPENDENT
'Above all this is an engorssing story' GUARDIAN

About the Author
Susan Cooper is a world-renowned author of children's books. Born in 1935 and brought up in England, she worked as a journalist before moving to America, where she now lives. Her fabulous Dark is Rising sequence has won the Newbery Medal and been twice nominated for the Carnegie Medal. As well as writing novels, Susan Cooper also writes successful plays, and screenplays for film and television.

Customer Reviews

A moving story
I feel sorry for "a reader", who appears to have completely missed the connection between Sam and Molly (her stepfather, with help, established that Sam was Molly's great-great-great-several times grandfather !). The reason Molly doesn't sell the piece of Nelson's flag that Sam left with his daughter and which then passed on to her, has nothing to do with her implied wealth, and everything to do with remembrance and memorialisation of the dead. Molly's father was killed when his plane went down over the sea - there was no body to recover for a funeral, so her mother held a memorial service which Molly was too young to appreciate. Sam didn't return from his final trip at sea either, so there would not have been a funeral service for him as there was for Admiral Nelson. Molly's act of putting the piece of flag into the sea was an act of remembrance for both her father and her distant ancestor, Sam. The book makes this quite clear when someone explains to Molly how men who are killed at sea are sewn into their hammocks and the remains are slipped into the sea.

As for Molly being a spoilt brat, perhaps "A reader" has never been severely homesick - in which case, they're very, very lucky - but Molly is young and has been uprooted from the home she loved and the only life she remembers, to go and live in a strange country. They may speak English over in the US, but it is still a foreign country, with different customs and habits from Britain.

Susan Cooper has done an excellent job of portraying the dizzying confusion of being uprooted from one's home, something that both Sam and Molly feel, and being transported to an entirely different lifestyle. The connections between the two children are established slowly and surely, and work very effectively. Both characters are drawn sympathetically, and both their stories are told beautifully. This is a fantastic book that shows Cooper's mastery of historical detail and creates both Molly's and Sam's worlds delightfully. I highly recommend this book.

Is 'Victory' Victorious?
This story is an amazing one.
There seem to be two stories woven together in this book.

One of the stories is set in the 17th Century; it is about a boy called Sam who oneday is taken from his family, by his Uncle, to the city where his uncle is a rope weaver. Sam along with his uncle are kidnapped and are taken on to the HMS VICTORY where he is set to work to fight against Napolean.

In the present day a girl called Molly has moved from England to Conneticut with her mother to join her new American stepfather. On a visit to her stepfather's childhood village they stop inside a bookshop and find a piece of Napolean's flag hden inside a book.....
For me 'Victory' is victorious.

Stirring and sensitive
I don't want to say too much about this book because I don't want to give the plot away. Molly is an English girl uprooted to Connecticut; Sam is a young boy press-ganged into serving in the British Navy during the Napoleonic Wars. Both are lost and homesick but what is the connection between them?

Cooper has great insight into loneliness and displacement. The only drawback to this book, for me, is the rather garish cover.