[.ca] Flight from the Fortress (ISBN 1550417924)

Amazon.ca:
In her latest novel for middle readers, veteran children's writer Lyn Cook delves into the checkered history of the fortified town of Louisbourg, on Canada's East Coast. The second of her books to be set in New France (the first was The Hiding Place), Flight from the Fortress reflects Cook's fascination with the lives of ordinary people swept up in the French-English wars of the 18th century. Her hero Philippe, who is a young teen in 1758, has ties to both sides. The son of a French mother and an English soldier, he has traveled in stealth to the French-controlled fortress hoping to reunite with his father, whom he believes to be working as a spy for the British fleet. While searching for a hole in the walls, he has two fateful encounters that set him on a new course--he rescues a beautiful French girl, Gaby, from drowning and is saved, in turn, by a black slave boy. Cook has clearly done her research and the scenes of daily life inside the besieged fortress are graphic and compelling. Her desire to impart information about the period, however, too often interferes with character development. Philippe and Gaby seem more like costumed tour guides than real 18th-century kids fleeing a battlefield with a stolen slave and two sleeping babies. Moreover, apart from the naval attack itself, the novel offers little in the way of conflict. Everyone Philippe's "little family" meets on their flight--from a gruff deserter to the mysterious white-robed monk--is sympathetically portrayed as yet another victim of Europe's colonial politics. Consequently, the children's ultimate deliverance has the air of an historical reenactment rather than a thrilling denouement. For historical fiction with a deeper ring of truth, readers are advised to turn to earlier Cook novels such as her classic The Bells on Finland Street. --Lisa Alward