Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar ( Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).ĭriven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. In the U.S., Molly commits Sam’s bit of flag to a sea burial, tying up this compelling, tautly rigged tale. She goes missing for four hours, curled unconscious in an interior cabin, seemingly witnessing the hellish Battle of Trafalgar and the mortal wounding of beloved Vice-Admiral Nelson. On a quick visit “home” before school’s start, touring the restored Victory at Portsmouth with Granddad, Molly’s prescience sharpens, mirroring Sam’s experiences. The narrative shifts between Molly’s second-person present passages (laced with mysterious leaks-via unremembered dreams and waking visions-of life aboard the Victory) and Sam’s vivid, first-person past recounting of pressed service-as virtual galley slave, then cannon crew “powder monkey”-during the Napoleonic War. In it she finds a secreted inscription and Sam’s tiny remnant of the Victory’s flag, flown during the Battle of Trafalgar. Molly (11), struggling to acclimate to a blended family and move from London to Connecticut, buys an old copy of Southey’s The Life of Nelson. In a blend of history and time travel, blood ties connect a girl in August 2006 with Sam Robbins, ship’s boy aboard the British battleship Victory two centuries before.
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