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Rinaldi, Ann.
MUTINY'S DAUGHTER
New York : HarperCollins, 2004.
IL 5-8, RL 5.1
ISBN 0060296399

(2 booktalks)

Booktalk #1

I love "what if" novels.  You know what I mean?  They take an historical event and add a what if something else happened.  In this case, Rinaldi looks at the life of Fletcher Christian.  Can anyone tell me who Fletcher Christian was?  Right.  He was the second-in-command aboard the ship Bounty.  When the ship landed in Tahiti, many of the men decided they did not want to return to England.  That, along with other circumstances, led young Fletcher Christian to lead the mutiny.  This was a real event and the story has been retold in books and movies.  Well, this book takes the position that Christian and his island wife had a child while living in exile on Pitcairn Island.  Christian has secretly brought the girl to England years before and she is now living with her uncle who everyone believes is her father.  Now on her way to boarding school, Mary longs to see her real father again and to stop living the lie.

Booktalk #2

This historical novel is based on the premise: What if Fletcher Christian, the lead mutineer of the HMS Bounty returned to England with his five-year-old, half-Tahitian daughter, Mary? The story actually begins nine years later, as Mary, forced by her family, begins life in a fashionable girls’ school in  London . Mary is forced to hide the secret of whom her father is, and a fellow student threatens to expose her secrets to the English society. Mary secretly hopes that her father is truly alive and is thrown into many life-threatening episodes in her search for the truth. The author provides a combination of fact and fiction in this 19th century English setting that intrigues the reader to join Mary in her quest for the truth. What really happened on the HMS Bounty? Is Mary’s father a ruthless pirate roaming the oceans? Is Mary’s father really alive? Is he nearby, watching over Mary? Will she meet him? Who are her friends? Who are her enemies? (Prepared by: Linda Hall, SCASL Junior Book Awards)

SUBJECTS:     Christian, Fletcher, 1764-1793 -- Fiction.
                        Christian, Mary, 1792- -- Fiction.
                        Bounty Mutiny, 1789 -- Fiction.
                        Great Britain -- History -- 1789-1820 -- Fiction.
                        Fathers and daughters -- Fiction.
                        Uncles -- Fiction.
                        Racially mixed people -- Fiction.
                        Historical fiction.

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