An Irish girl helps rescue two survivors
from the wrecked Spanish Armada

In the year 1588, the King of Spain sent a huge fleet of warships to invade England. Through the combined effort of the English Navy and the appearance of raging storms along the coast of Britain, the Spanish were defeated. Many of the warships were wrecked in the storms, and a few survivors, including both men and horses, were washed ashore.

A fourteen-year-old Irish girl, named Nora Donovan, is known for her extreme love of horses and the unusual ability she has to make friends with the wild horses that roam the Irish countryside. In one of her wanderings along the shoreline, she discovers both a beautiful warhorse and a youthful Spanish survivor. Both of them are injured and need her nursing care. She manages to hide both of them in a cave close to shore as she helps them recover from their injuries.

Nora knows if the young Spaniard is discovered by English soldiers, he likely will be shot or hanged as an enemy. The large Spanish warhorse will be seen as a trophy and probably turned into a mount for an English officer. Nora, if she is discovered hiding either the young man or the warhorse, risks being hanged as a traitor.

The main part of the story is concerned with how Nora struggles to help the young Spaniard reach a rescue ship that will return him to Spain. She also struggles to keep the beautiful Spanish horse from being captured and used by the English to continue their oppression of her people.

We learn how a young Irish girl uses her special talent with horses to pull off a rescue of the two survivors she found during the epic defeat of the Spanish Armada. In the process, we also learn about living conditions in the Ireland of the 16th century, from the point of view of a young girl of that era.

TITLE

"Are you Martha Boyle?" That's how this little book begins. A woman is at Martha's front door asking this question. It turns out she is the mother of a girl named Olive Barstow, who had been in Martha's grade at school. Summer vacation had just started. Just a few weeks before, Olive had been hit by a car and killed, while riding her bike. Before quickly leaving, the mother gave Martha a folded up page from the journal Olive had kept. On it, poor Olive had written that she hoped that she could write a book someday. She also said she thought Martha Boyle was the nicest person in her whole class and that she hoped that the two of them could become friends.

Martha was stunned. Some of the boys in the class had been mean to Olive. She and the other girls hadn't been mean especially, they had just ignored Olive. She was just so quiet and so shy; nobody tried to be her friend. Now, she was dead. And for some reason she had liked Martha and she had wanted to be a writer, just like Martha wanted to be a writer. It was all so weird.

The entire Boyle family was getting ready to go on summer vacation to grandmother's house at the beach. Martha had always liked going to her grandmother's for the summer, but this time, she knew she wouldn't stop thinking about Olive. She knew she had to do something to commemorate Olive. She also knew she couldn't talk about it to any members of her family, except maybe her grandmother. Because she was old and sometimes hinted at her own upcoming death, only grandmother might understand.

Besides her mom and dad, Martha's little sister, Lucy, and her brother, Vince, who was one year older than Martha, made up the Boyle family. In a nearby house was the Manning family - five boys - Jimmy, Tate, Todd, Luke, and Leo. Martha was interested in Jimmy, who that summer was focused on making a video. Jimmy was her brother Vince's age. Tate was her age and the other brothers were younger.

For some reason that summer, Jimmy showed considerable interest in Martha and wanted to involve her in his attempts to make videos. In fact, Martha began to think maybe she and Jimmy might become boyfriend and girlfriend. She was terribly hurt when she found out her first kiss was just something to be filmed for Jimmy's video.

Another event that had considerable impact on Martha was her near accidental drowning, while swimming near the shore. After a summer like this, can Martha ever resume her normal life with a positive outlook? Will she ever get over her preoccupation with death? Can she ever trust a boy again? Will she ever become the writer she wants to be?

A boy brings home a raven to help cure
his grandfather's heart condition

Charlie Carlisle liked staying with his grandparents. They lived on a ranch close to the Teton Mountains and away from the city. Charlie was worried when his grandfather had a heart attack and was slow to recover from it. Singing Bird, a Sioux Indian girl, who was a good friend to Charlie, had told him elders in her tribe believed that ravens had magical healing powers and could help people recover from illness. So Charlie decided to steal a young raven from the two babies he found in a nearby nest and bring it home to raise.

The young raven was named "Blue Sky." Blue Sky and Granddad quickly became friends. Of course, Granddad had been a naturalist who studied bird behavior before he became ill. Granddad showed Charlie how to keep scientific notes on raven behavior. As he studied Blue Sky and other ravens, Charlie was practicing to become a naturalist if he wanted to be one when he grew up.

To his surprise, Charlie found that Blue Sky's parents were perched on the roof of the house almost every morning. They were keeping an eye on how the baby was being taken care of by the humans. Later, the other baby raven from the nest was brought by its parents to hang around the house where Blue Sky was living. The humans named her "Pinecone." Apparently, the parent ravens liked how Blue Sky was being fed and taken care of, so they brought Pinecone over to be cared for by the humans also. That way the adult ravens had more time to go off on their own. They turned the humans into babysitters for the young ravens. Talk about smart birds!

By bringing a baby raven into the house, Charlie had definitely given his grandfather a reason to get up and be more active than he had been. Granddad had always been fascinated by ravens and now Charlie had provided an excellent situation to study raven behavior up close. Not only did they have Blue Sky to study, but Pinecone and the parent ravens were also handy subjects to study.

Any reader will find Blue Sky's antics entertaining and amusing as he tries to control the humans' behavior. He sees them as other ravens and tries to make himself the "boss raven." Questions remain to be answered. Is raven magic great enough to keep Granddad from having another heart attack? What will eventually happen as Blue Sky matures and is able to fly off with the wild ravens? How will Charlie feel if he finally has to let the raven go off on his own? What will be the impact of Charlie's experiment with ravens on those people around who think ravens are evil birds? These are just a few of the questions that will be answered as you read "Charlie's Raven."