In the future, Molly's misery has prompted her mother to take her home to England for a quick holiday with her grandparents - as the visit ends, Molly's grandfather takes her to Portsmouth, where she has another strange - and frightening to all around her -episode on a visit to tour Nelson's flagship. Then war escalates, leading up to the famous battle - between British, French and Spanish fleets - of Trafalgar, where we see Sam working frantically as a powder monkey. Gradually Sam adjusts to shipboard life and just as slowly his situation improves. Shipboard life was cruel to pressed sailors, and Cooper makes this clear, but also portrays the small kindnesses that must have made it bearable, including the occasional intervention by a decent officer - even, on Sam's behalf, by Nelson himself. In the early 1800s, we join Sam as a ship's boy (one of the lowest of the low) aboard Victory. At that moment, without really knowing it, she embarks on a quest. Molly - who has a very mild form of epilepsy and calls episodes of the illness going sideways - feels a strong power and giddiness when she touches the scrap of flag. Carl buys it for her and at home, Molly discovers a tiny brown paper envelope hidden inside, enclosing a small scrap of the flag of HMS Victory. There, Molly feels impelled to own an old battered-looking Life of Nelson. On a family outing to Mystic Seaport, the Hibbert family browse in a bookstore owned by an Englishman from Portsmouth. In Europe during the Napoleonic Wars, we meet young Sam Robbins, pressed into the British Navy to serve on the Victory, eventually to become Admiral Nelson's flagship. In the modern day, we have Molly Jennings, whose father died in a plane crash into the ocean, and whose mother has remarried American Carl Hibbert, resulting in a move - unwelcome to a homesick Molly - to Connecticut. In her gripping Victory, Susan Cooper masterfully tells parallel stories of two eleven-year-olds separated in time.

Victory by susan cooper