THE YOUNG PATRIOTS

I don't know why this isn't better than it is. Marjorie Hayes spins a good yarn, but in this book her characters fall to come alive. She tells the story of an orphaned Boston girl, her uncle a Tory, her own inclinations towards the patriot side, London bound at the start of troubles in Hoston, and captured by pirates. She escapes, with her Negro slave boy, and they take refuge on Block Island, and live there with the Loyalist natives, fitting themselves into a wholly new life. War starts, they are on the fringe of things, and life goes on. A new aspect of the American Revolutionary period, not wholly convincing in the telling.