Review ~ Sven and the Purse of Silver by Michael E. Wills

Silverwood Books
May 2019

Illustrated by Viviene Shepphard

My thanks to the author for my copy of this book

Sven’s father is a prisoner in a faraway country. There is a way to get him free and Sven knows how to do it, but he will need help. An offer of assistance comes from a very unexpected and frightening source. Will Sven be brave enough to accept it?

What did I think about it..

Our introduction to nine year old Sven, who lived a thousand years ago in a place called Sweden,  starts this adventurous story which is aimed at younger readers.

Sven watched his father set sail to the Land of the Rus with his words echoing that he would return to Sven.. "when the birds fly south before the winter.. I will be coming home with silver and presents for your mother and you.." But although he watched and waited, Sven's father did not return as promised, and therein starts Sven's intrepid adventure to rescue his father from the Land of the Rus.

The story is aimed at younger readers and is simply told but with enough adventure to hold the imagination and there are some quite beautiful illustrations which really help to bring the narrative alive. I can well imagine that young readers will thoroughly enjoy Sven's adventures because he is quite an intrepid character. His quest to find his father is filled with a sense of danger and a lovely magical element which reminded me of an adventuresome fairy story.

Coming in at 35 pages, Sven and the Purse of Silver is just the right length of story for a comfortable bedtime read and I am sure that confident young readers will find much to enjoy when Sven's adventure gets underway. Equally, it's also the right sort of length to be comfortably read over a couple of evenings as a bedtime story and I would imagine that the grown up will enjoy it too, I know I did !

Sven and the Purse of Silver is out now and published by Silverwood Books

About the Author

Michael Wills was born in Newport on the Isle of Wight and attended the Priory Boys School and Carisbrooke Grammar. He trained as a teacher at St Peter’s College, Birmingham, before working at a secondary school in Kent.

Website

Twitter @MWillsofSarum

@SilverWoodBooks


Purchase Link

Review ~ Children of the Chieftain: Bound for Home by Michael E. Wills

Silverwood Books
March 2019

My thanks to the author for my copy of this book

After three years in the service of the emperor of the Greeks, Ahl and his Viking friends have become very rich. Now the crew longs to return home with their wealth, their problem is that the emperor will not permit them to leave. They make a daring plan to escape. The route home is perilous as they navigate uncharted seas. They must overcome robbers, storms and hostile strangers as they seek their way back to the Northlands with the riches which they have earned.

My thoughts..

In Bound for Home we meet up with our intrepid adventurers some three years into their sojourn with the emperor of the Greeks. During their time away they have accumulated riches which now allows them the opportunity to return home to the Northlands, and so after meticulous planning they make their escape. However, the sea journey in their ship the Eagle is filled with danger and Ahl and his friends must use their considerable wits to survive in dangerous and uncharted seas.

Right from the start, Bound For Home reads like a splendid adventure and I think in this closing story there is also a real sense of accomplishment as their time in exile shows that the characters have grown from boys to young men who have seen and experienced far more than they could ever have imagined. 

On their hazardous return journey to the north the close camaraderie they share is tested to the limit when they take on new passengers and come into contact with the Norwegian Jarl Tryggvason who is a cold and calculating warrior. I especially liked the references to Aenglandi as the crew sail along the great tidal river to meet with King Ethelred in the place known as London.

Bound for Home is imaginatively told to appeal to young readers and there is never a moment when the action doesn't deliver a real sense of exploration and intrigue. I've now been following this story from its beginning in 2015, and to see how the both the story and the characters have evolved over the course of this grand historical adventure has been a real pleasure to observe.

   

About the Author

Michael Wills was born in Newport on the Isle of Wight and attended the Priory Boys School and Carisbrooke Grammar. He trained as a teacher at St Peter’s College, Birmingham, before working at a secondary school in Kent.

Website

Twitter @MWillsofSarum

@SilverWoodBooks


Purchase Link

Review ~ Children of the Chieftain : Bounty by Michael E. Wills

Silverwood Books
March 2017

Children of the Chieftain: Bounty is the third installment in this excellent Viking series which is aimed at young readers.

What's it all about..

The orphan children of the late chieftain, Sten Brightsword, have been banished from their island home after they disobeyed the instruction of the “Ting”, the island parliament. In order to be allowed to return they must bring with them a warrior’s helmet filled with silver.

The brother and sister, Ahl who is now seventeen and Ingir who is a year older, get the help of the Governor of a town in northern Russia after Ingir becomes engaged to the Governor’s son. But things go wrong for them when the town is threatened by an attack from enemies. They escape south and after many adventures Ahl and his crew reach Constantinople. At last things look better for them when the Emperor offers them work which is so highly paid that they must surely earn enough silver bounty to fill a helmet.

What did I think about it...

When I was ten or eleven I loved reading historical adventure stories and I am sure that if the Children of the Chieftain books had been around at that time I would have devoured them just as eagerly as I did the work of Alan Garner and Leon Garfield.

I’ve followed this series from the beginning and have seen both the story telling and the characters grow in confidence, and as each story comes along there is a clever continuance of the historical adventure which unfolds in every story. In The Children of the Chieftain: Bounty the young crew of the Viking ship, Eagle set off on a new adventure, on a journey which will take them to new and exciting places, and which will be fraught with danger and cruel mischance.

As always the author writes a really good, rollicking adventure and never compromises on accurate description nor does he patronise his young readers by omitting the dangerous aspects of this time in history. The historical research is as ever impeccably achieved and there is a real feeling of authenticity to the story which those who have read the series from the beginning will recognise as typical of this author’s fine attention to detail.

Whilst Bounty may be read as a standalone historical adventure, as always, my advice is to read any series from the start, as that way you notice the progression, and the story becomes far more meaningful when you become emotionally invested in the characters.

For younger readers who may struggle with some of the terminology, or even for adults like me who may need some clarification, there is a helpful word explanation at the end of the book.

At the start of this Viking adventure I was informed that it was to be a trilogy of work, I am especially pleased to find that there is now to be a fourth book, The Children of the Chieftain: Bound for Home which will oversee the conclusion. Most certainly the ending of Bounty lends itself to even more adventures in the final conclusion.

Best Read With …smoked meat and porridge...and a foaming tankard of ale for the grownups...

You can read an excellent guest post by the author about The Lure of Miklagård by clicking here

About the Author

Find Michael on his website

Follow him on Twitter @MWillsofSarum

My thanks to the author for sharing his book with me.

Children of the Chieftain: Bounty is out now and published by Silverwood Books

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Sunday WW1 Remembered...

The author, Michael Wills 

shares this poignant account of what happened to his grandfather, Albert Sanger in 1917

A Hundred years ago, this month

At the outbreak of the First World War, my grandfather Albert Sanger and Harry Trowbridge, the brother of Albert’s sweetheart, Amy, joined the queue of volunteers at Newport, Isle of Wight, Drill Hall. Albert, aged 21, was a miller and Harry, aged 17, was a butcher’s errand boy. Both were enlisted to the Isle of Wight Rifles, an infantry regiment which was part of the Hampshire Regiment.

After training, on 30th July 1915, together with seven or eight thousand other men, they embarked on the liner Aquitania in Liverpool docks. The troop ship had two escorting destroyers to protect against German submarines. However, the weather was so bad that the escorts had to return to port on 31st. The ship took a long detour out into the Atlantic to avoid the U-boats. On 8th August, the “Rifles” were landed in the Dardanelles, Turkey.

Harry Trowbridge

Most of the men from the Isle of Wight were not to see England again for over two years. A large proportion, including Harry, were never to return. After a terrible mauling during the fighting at Suvla Bay, most of the Battalion were shipped to Alexandria in Egypt. Harry’s body was never identified, he is remembered on the memorial at Helios, not far from the site of the battle. Albert, wounded in the fighting, was repatriated to England. There he married Amy before being shipped to Alexandria to re-join his battalion in autumn 1916.

The Isle of Wight Rifles were encamped by the Pyramids of Giza and then moved on to a deployment at the Bitter lakes, by the Suez Canal. By then, the remaining raw recruits of 1914 were hardened soldiers, but nevertheless the territory through which they were fighting took its toll. The regimental diary tells of snakes, scorpions, sand storms and extreme heat.

In January 1917, they marched first to Mazar and then in February they began chasing the retreating Turkish army across the Sinai Desert. The 145 mile march across the desert to El Arish  took twelve days. On the 17th April, the offensive against the Turkish line at Gaza began. On the morning of 19th April, the “Rifles” led the attack against the Sihan Redoubt. The Redoubt was captured, but at the roll call at the end of the day, of the 800 men who went into action, only 2 officers and 90 men were recorded. Among those who did not respond to the roll call was Albert.

After the capture of Jerusalem, one of Albert’s mates returned to the scene of the battle of Sihan Redoubt. He found Albert’s army paybook and tatters of uniform still on the barbed wire of the Turkish line. The paybook, which soldiers usually kept in their left-hand breast pocket, had a bayonet hole through it and was soaked in blood. Meaning well, he sent a letter to my grandmother telling her of the circumstances of Albert’s death and enclosing the paybook. She kept it until her death in 1941. What Albert was never to know was that he had a daughter, my mother, who was born in March 1917.

Albert and Amy Sanger's
 Wedding Photograph
1916

Corporal Albert Sanger’s grave and many others of the men of 1st Battalion Isle of Wight Rifles, is in the war cemetery in Gaza. 

 

Huge thanks to Michael for sharing Albert and Harry's story. It is so important that the lives of brave men, like Albert and Harry, and of the sacrifices they made for King and country should never be forgotten.

Michael also has an interest in modern history and has a website relating to the evacuation of Dunkirk in World War II.

Click here for more details

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Guest Author ....Michael E. Wills

I am delighted to welcome back to the blog historical fiction writer

Michael E. Wills

 Michael has written this fascination guest post about The Lure of Miklagård...
                         

In the third of my quartet of Viking novels for young readers,” Children of the Chieftain: Bounty”, a seventeen-year-old boy voyages with his crew down the rivers of Russia and the Ukraine to Miklagård, the Viking name for Constantinople, or Istanbul as it is known today. There they seek their fortune and are well rewarded by the emperor for their services. Fanciful? Not at all, there is an historical precedent, a story which really illustrates the statement, “the truth can be stranger than fiction”.

St Olaf is the patron saint of Norway and many churches, even in England, are dedicated to him. He was killed in 1030 when defeated in a battle against his discontented subjects. At his side in the battle was his fifteen-year-old half-brother Harald Sigurdsson. The boy was commanding six-hundred warriors, his own followers.

Harald was wounded in the battle, but his men managed to rescue him and take him into hiding in a farm in the mountains between Norway and Sweden, before they escaped into Sweden. There he spent the winter recovering from his injuries. In the spring, his men returned to collect their leader. The small army was re-armed by the king of Sweden and set off east to serve Grand Prince Jarolslav, the ruler of a huge area of what is now Russia. At the age of sixteen, Harald was made captain of Jaroslav’s forces as they fought insurrections and invasions by Poles.

Before Harald was twenty, seeking his fortune, he led his force of six-hundred down the Dneiper River and across the Black Sea to Constantinople, which the Vikings knew as Miklagård. There he offered his services to the Emperor of Greece. (The area now known as Turkey!) And in the service of Emperor Michael IV, Harald and his men really did make their fortunes. They were given the task of ridding the Aegean Sea of pirates who had been plundering the islands. This work was extremely lucrative as not only were the Scandinavians paid for doing the work, but they were able to keep the goods, many of them valuable cargoes, which they seized. The Emperor required only a small percentage of what they recovered.

Impressed by their work, their employer drafted the force into his elite personal guard, the Varangians. Harald was given the rank of commander of this unit. Much of the work of the Varangians was to guard the Emperor, but they also acted on orders to take retribution and revenge on enemies of the state. This work was often far from pleasant as apart from executions, a standard form of punishment was “blinding”.

Nevertheless. Varangians were not always gainfully employed and seemed to have plentiful spare time. In what was once the Greek Empire there are still today, some ancient relics which have Scandinavian runes scrawled on them, graffiti written by bored Varangians. One example of this is shown in the picture. This marble lion statue on the left is three metres tall and was sculpted around 350 BC. It once stood in Piraeus, the harbour of Athens. 

Clearly, it was visited by the Varangians as can be seen in the close up picture of a copy of this lion, in Stockholm Museum of History. The runic text commemorates a dead Varangian warrior called Horsi. He came from Roslagen, north of Stockholm and the runes tell us that he had “earned much gold”.

                         

Harald and his men became victims of their own success. In 1042, when they had amassed a considerable fortune they asked for the Emperor’s permission to go home. By this time there was a new ruler of the Greek Empire, Empress Zoe. She refused to let the Varnagians return to their own country, they were too valuable to her. However, risking the terrible vengeance of his employer, Harald managed to ecape with a few of his men in two ships laden with valuables. He then embarked on the lengthy and dangerous voyage home to Norway. On his way, he visited Grand Price Jaroslav and persuaded him that he was now wealthy enough to marry the Prince’s daughter, Princess Elisiv.

On his return to Norway, Harald used his enormous wealth to gain the throne. But his ambition did not stop there. He decided that he had a legitimate claim to the throne of England. He built up a formidable army of around sixteen thousand men and a fleet of three hundred ships to mount an invasion to claim the throne. Forming an alliance with Tostig, the exiled brother of King Harold of England, he landed in the north of England in September 1066. That year is of course most famous for the Battle of Hastings, however, Harald’s invading army was far bigger than the Norman one. What happened next was to shape the future of England, its people, its language and culture.

King Harold of England force marched his army to York to meet the threat. His arrival was completely unexpected by Harald of Norway who was still celebrating a victory over the local Earls. Despite his army being travel weary and outnumbered, the English King won the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25th September. Harald Sigurdsson and Tostig were both killed. However, the price in English lives was high and when King Harold then set off south to counter the second invasion, that of the Normans, his army was much depleted.  He had few cavalry left and most of his best archers were dead. The rest is history, but there is no doubt that had Harald of Norway not interfered, the Battle of Hastings might well have gone another way.

As I said at the beginning, “the truth can be stranger than fiction”. The story of Harald, who later became known as “Harald Hardrada”, that is, “Harald Hard Ruler”, is so incredible that I doubt that any historical fiction writer could have written it.

About the Author

Michael is the author of a series of Viking adventure novels aimed at younger readers.

Find Michael on his website

Follow him on Twitter @MWillsofSarum

Huge thanks to Michael for this informative guest post about The Lure of Miklagård.


His latest novel Children of the Chieftain: Bounty is soon to be published by Silverwood Books.

Silverwood Books

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Review ~ Children of the Chieftain : Banished by Michael E. Wills

Silverwood Books
2015

Aimed at the young reader’s book market, Children of the Chieftain: Banished is a rollicking good story which continues the Viking trilogy which began with Children of the Chieftain: Betrayed. The story opens where the first book left off and follows the exciting adventures of a group of intrepid young people who lives have been irreversibly changed by the Viking raid on their small town on the Isle of Birches in Birka, which is now in modern day Sweden.  In this second story, one of their friends has been captured and sold into slavery in the land of the Rus and the children of the old chieftain, who we first met in Betrayed, set out to do all they can to liberate one of their own people.

What draws me, an adult reader, into these Viking adventures is the fine attention to detail which the author instils into his novels. There is certainly no compromise on detail for a younger reading audience who, I am sure, will find much to enjoy in this thrilling story. Thriving on exciting historical content, this ancient world is wonderfully recreated and is filled with characters who are always believable, not always likeable, but who, collectively, add a real sense of authenticity to a story which abounds with excitement, danger and a real sense of adventure.

I am sure that those readers like me, who have followed the children of the chieftain from the beginning, will find much to enjoy in this continuation and will, by the end of the story, be looking eagerly towards book three, and the conclusion of the story, which is expected in Children of the Chieftain: Bounty.

Younger readers may need help with some of the terminology used and for those readers who are not familiar with Viking vocabulary there is an interesting and helpful glossary at the end of the book which explains some of the terms used in daily life.

Best read with ...wooden cups of ice cold stream water and line caught fish cooked over a wood fire..

About the Author

Find Michael on his website

Follow him on Twitter @MWillsofSarum

Buy on Amazon UK

Read a sample chapter from Children of the Chieftain : Banished 

My thanks to Michael for sharing his book with Jaffareadstoo

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Review ~ Children of the Chieftain : Betrayed by Michael E. Wills

Silverwood Books
2015

When the town of Birka is raided by the most fearsome of Vikings, the Jomsviking, many of the people are captured. A group of orphans are forced to take action and lead their friends in a desperate attempt to rescue the captives. But not all of their allies are as loyal as they should be. The brave children are betrayed and find themselves in grave danger of captivity and risk being sold into slavery.

I have a great passion for historical fiction and can remember quite clearly when I was an early reader at primary school racing through stories of great adventure and of the thrill of being transported back in time. I am sure that modern day children are no less excited by the tales of derring-do and that even in this computer age , the majority of kids can appreciate a good story when they see one.

When asked to read and review Children of the Chieftain: Betrayed, I agreed eagerly as I have already read the work of this fine author before and I knew that even though this story is distinctly targeted at the children’s market, it would appeal to my sense of fun and adventure.

The story is really well written with an entirely appropriate sense of adventure which neither patronises nor overly protects its young audience. There’s a definite sense of time and place and the palpable air of fear generated by the Viking raid is particularly well done. The young people, on whom the book focuses, are feisty and fearless and show remarkable fortitude in the presence of great danger.I think that this is something that would appeal to, maybe, eight to thirteen year olds who enjoy a rollicking good adventure, and it works equally well as an introduction to Scandinavian history.  The book is a perfect length, I read it quite comfortably in the space of an afternoon, but probably a child with rather more distractions may want to read it, either with an adult or curled up on a chair, over a  longer period of time. 

I am also reassured that there is to be a sequel - Children of the Chieftan : Banished, is expected sometime next year, so there’s plenty of adventure still to come, and in the hands of this fine writer, I am sure that it’s going to be something to really look forward to.

About the Author

Silverwood Books

Amazon UK

Twitter @MWillsofSarum

Children of the Chieftain: Betrayed is currently the HNS Editor's choice and has been longlisted for the HNS Indie Award 2016 - here

My thanks to Michael for sharing his book with me.

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