Victory

Victory, by Susan Cooper, interweaves the lives of a young, modern-day English girl and a young man on the ship of Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson. Molly has been recently transplanted to America when her mother marries a man from Connecticut. She painfully misses her grandparents and friends in London, the only home she has ever known.
Sam Robbins is a farm boy living in the early 1800's. He is kidnapped from the streets of London and put aboard an English sailing ship to work in the English Navy. This is the time of English "impressment" and although he is allowed to sign on as a sailor, rather than being impressed, he still is powerless to get out of the navy. It so happens the ship he is on is the Victory which sails in the Battle of Trafalger and is the ship where Nelson loses his life.
When Molly buys an old book on the life of Horatio Nelson, she finds a piece of the sale from the original Victory, secreted in an envelope. This was once Sam's and seems to hold a kind of mystical hold on the past. Molly visits her grandparents in London for a week, and her grandfather takes her on a tour of the refurbished Victory. There, she falls into a dreamlike trance, reliving the life of Sam on the ship.
Although the character of Molly realistically reflects a young teen who is unhappy with her family's move, the final interweaving of her life with Sam's takes an incredulous turn. For her to be hospitalized and then realize she must return her "Sam's bit of Nelson to the deep" is a stretch. There is much good history here about the English Navy and the hard life of a sailor, and the glossary at the end of the book explains many terms having to do sailing in the nineteenth century.
Four stars.