Iron Thunder: The Battle Between the Monitor & the Merrimac

Here is a civil war novel about a boy aboard the Union's Monitor. Not a bad book, but it is really the reader's interest in this bizarre battle and the advent of ironsides in naval battles that really carry the story along. This is to say that fascination in history and not a fascinating in the plot makes the book move along.

The side stories about young Tom Carroll are fine. There is a conniving copperhead spy who forms the first plot, and the actual battle with the Merrimac forms the second. 3 Stars.

Blood on the River: James Town 1607, by Elisa Carbon

Well Done.
Historical fiction has so many pitfalls that most rarely get read. The desire to be history often slays the story. If that danger is meet and surmounted then the history often comes in as an aside -- and like small towns in the heartland, if you blink you'll miss it. This book about James Town navigates both the Scylla of fact and of Charybdis of play: neither too exacting to be literature, or too liberal to be history. Here is a fine book

But it has more strengths than that. A story about a street urchin gone colonist has the interplay of Indian politics as stage, the colonists' pastor as hero, and the boys learning to heed the latter for the former as the climax. Of course, for all this praise it does have its low points: a tad over-descriptive, a bit sappy, an abrupt end, and a few blank spots in Samuel character. Nevertheless, a good four star read.