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In her new neighborhood and school, Sarah becomes a target for bullies until she learns to fight for her rights and begins to adjust unfortunately, her father isn't as quick to adapt to his new circumstances. Sarah Ann Puckett thinks her father is joking when, having lost their farm during the Depression, he pulls up to a shabby shack and announces that it is to be their new home. (Fiction.The Depression and its people come alive in this touching and well-crafted novel.

But there’s too little excitement, and too much tedious starving and stumbling about in the bush, to keep readers interested in his changing fortunes-or to care much when, at the end, massive plot contrivances bring him a pardon that clears the way for further adventures.

As before, the violence of the naval action, underscored by Will’s gut-wrenching terror, is sharp and vivid. But with monotonous regularity, a rescuer steps in before any permanent damage can occur, whether it be his steadfast buddy Richard or, more often, a hulking homosexual shipmate or some other conveniently appearing adult. Thanks largely to his own stupidity, Sam gets into one scrape after another, including being “transported” to the distant prison colony on a trumped-up cowardice charge. 11-13)ĭowswell’s nautical Napoleonic-era tale, begun in Powder Monkey (2005), loses steam in this sequel, which carries young Sam from Admiral Nelson’s own quarterdeck at the Battle of Copenhagen to seemingly interminable wanderings through the Australian outback as an escaped convict. Readers too will be unmoved, and will likely prefer such shorter versions as the one by Paule Du Bouchet with Fabian Negrin’s otherworldly illustrations (2004), or Charles Mikolaycak’s sensual rendition (1992). But the human figures are sketchier than the immortal ones, and unlike his listeners, Orpheus seems oddly unmoved by his music. Written in formal cadences-“The thought of poetry was so much long-cold ash to him, and the memory of song was bitter”-and divided into numerous short chapters, the tale includes encounters with Charon and Cerberus, the enigmatic Pluto (he goes by both Greek and Roman names here) and a strangely content Sisyphus. Freely changing details, he opens with the great musician’s rescue of a baby girl left out on a hillside to perish, closes not with Orpheus’s violent death, but a soul-restoring discovery that Princess Eurydice is not entirely lost to him, and in between, takes him from the giddy heights of romance to Hades’s sunless realm. Cadnum follows up Starfall: Phaeton and the Chariot of the Sun (2004) with another myth inspired by Ovid’s version, but woodenly recast as a novel.