Grade 5–7 — The faery world is crumbling. During a disaster called the Sundering, these small, fragile, winged creatures lost all of their magic save that which allows them to fly, and they live inside a great oak tree, fearful of people and animals. True friendship and love are foreign to them. Worse, they are falling victim to a kind of dementia they call the Silence, and are dying. Into this picture comes Knife: tough, brave, adventurous, and soon taking on the job of Queen's Hunter.
The reigning master of grand historical fiction returns with the stirring conclusion to his bestselling Dublin Saga. The Princes of Ireland, the first volume of Edward Rutherfurd’s magisterial epic of Irish history, ended with the disastrous Irish revolt of 1534 and the disappearance of the sacred Staff of Saint Patrick. The Rebels of Ireland opens with an Ireland transformed; plantation, the final step in the centuries-long English conquest of Ireland, is the order of the day, and the subjugation of the native Irish Catholic population has begun in earnest.
David Liss has found his niche as a historical novelist, and The Whiskey Rebels is an entertaining, if slightly uneven, slice of Americana. Liss's strength here lies in the details, particularly in the historical figures who play minor roles—George Washington, Aaron Burr, Phillip Freneau, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge among them. Those characters add color to the plot and evoke the late 18th-century history that many of us (for shame) have forgotten.
Fresh from duty on the frigate Desperate in her fight with the French Capricieuse, Alan Lewrie is commissioned first officer of the big o'war Shrike. He must bring the Muskogees and the Seminoles onto the British side against the American rebels--with time out, of course, for some other kind of action.
The Year is 1778, the ship is the 18-gun HMS Sparrow, England's finest sloop of war, and the captain is Richard Bolitho, sailing his command into the fury of battle. The American Revolution has turned the Atlantic Coast into a refuge for privateers and marauding French warships. It is up to young Bolitho to fight the colonial rebels, to stave off the treachery of a beautiful woman, and to overcome the dangerous incompetence of a senior officer before it is too late.
