Time Travelers: Victory by Susan Cooper

Susan Cooper, best known for her Newbery book The Dark Is Rising, its prequels, and its sequels, has written another book in which past and present time frames overlap in the mind of the main character. Victory melds the modern-day life of Molly, an English girl unhappily transferred to Connecticut after her mother's marriage, and Sam, a young English farm boy who is captured by a "press gang" and serves on HMS Victory, flagship of Lord Nelson in the battle of Trafalgar.

Intensely homesick in America, Molly is drawn to buy an old biography of Lord Nelson in a bookstore and finds a tiny fragment of the ensign flag of the Victory concealed inside the cover. The inscription with the piece says that the bit of flag was given to Sam at the funeral of Lord Nelson and passed on to his daughter. When Molly and her mother return to England for a visit, Molly is drawn to visit the Victory, where her connection to Sam intensifies into an overwhelming flashback in which she relives the sensory experiences of the battle aboard the ship just as Sam experienced them.

Cooper does an amazing job of time shifting between Molly's intense homesickness for London and Sam's traumatic induction into the life of a ship's boy in 1803. In the concluding chapters Molly traces Sam's lineage and realizes that she is probably his descendant. To honor his memory and that of her father, also lost at sea, Molly consigns her valuable relic of the Victory's battle flag to the sea.

Victory ably weaves much historical information into Sam's adventure as an impressed seaman while providing emotional depth to Molly's search to find her own personal history and her place in it.

Other books in the aforementioned The Dark Is Rising sequence are the prequels Over Sea, Under Stone and Greenwitch and sequels The Grey King and Silver on the Tree.