Had sought their household fires.

I finished The Yankee the other day, but I've been a little too busy to write about it until now.

It was pretty good -- the story followed one Gabriel Markham, the nephew of Malachi Markham, born just a year or two before the end of the previous book and Malachi's death. The book takes place in 1814, so Gabriel is in his early 30s. The structure of the novel is, in many ways, directly the opposite of that of The Privateer, and very refreshingly so. For example, where Malachi was very much not religious and did what he felt was best without adherence to his puritanical family's beliefs, Gabriel is fervently religious and maintains a very strict ethical code. Each novel had 3 main ship battle set pieces, the structures of which are fairly similar between the books, but which are reversed in order. Another key thing I noticed is that when Malachi dies at the end of the first book, he's drunk on laudanum, sure he'll be fine, and in fact not fully aware of the attack being levied against him. At the end of this book, Gabriel enters into a losing battle knowing full well that he will not survive it, even if his side wins, but he does so anyways, to save his friends and family.

There's actually a lot of clever, subtle details and other interesting aspects of these books that I'd love to be able to discuss with other people who've read them, but frankly I'm not sure that anybody else has ever read these, considering how difficult they were to find in the first place. It's too bad, as I think a lot of people I know would enjoy reading them.

I'm now reading Ernest Kenyon's Rogue Golem, a book that I bought simply because I kept seeing it over and over again in used bookstores. It's not bad.