Firehawk

I love Native American stories and this one was didn't disappoint me. Right off the bat, it is obvious that a lot of research went into this book, but the facts don’t “hit you in the face”, rather they make the time period come alive with lush details and sensatory description that draw the reader in.This is a definite read for those who love history, love Westerns and Native American love stories.

FIREHAWK begins with war. Nancy Morse offers the year 1757 when the inhabitants of colonies in New England had to fight France and England, neither of which wanted to give up a possible claim so they commission the Indians to shed blood of the settlers in the new world. Then she gives us the young, benign Alice Winslow, a victim steeped in tragedy after witnessing the fatal destiny of her family.Tavern war talks among travelers, one being a British deputy, another a missionary and a merchant introduce the reader to Firehawk and tell of his rescue of settlers from the French and their cohorts, the Hurons. Nancy Morse wrote me right into the play by play of a well described massacre as the description of Firehawk speaks to a hero quality akin to D'Artagnan. Alice's mission was to find young Billy, and rescue him from a hostage situation hosted by Francois Bigot after the William Henry massacre when he was kidnapped. She wanted to find Firehawk and hopeful that she could convince him to accompany her to Montreal to redeem her brother's five year old son; she became obsessed by that thought while she was forced to forfeit her own integrity as a bar maid to save enough for his ransom until she snapped and acted out her rage against one of the drunkards who habitually grabbed at her body when she served him, costing her a job and a near death experience on her way home.Morse lays out the landscape of Central New York that is no match for the current hustle bustle of the highlight cityscape we know today. Her tale envelopes travel though the foliage of the past in Central New York and makes it sound more like one would describe the black Hills of Dakota. Yet, she writes of it in the present tense.As Alice sets passage to Montreal to rescue Billy, against all good advice from a dark stranger, and against all odds for surviving this journey, she braves a challenge too enormous for even the strongest man. Morse describes her "tenacity, pluck and her bravery," as she paints a portrait of a woman with a made up mind like she is painting a still life of a rebel defined that includes everything a strong woman should be without revealing a shred of limitation no matter how close to the skin it rested. My interest in this story peaked before I decided which entity was more dangerous to Alice. Was it the French or the Hurons? And my inability to close this book rested on the question of whether Alice would find Billy dead or alive and if she would end up dead in the process. I learned early in the book that Morse's writing style would continuously sustain my curiosity. Strong expressive writing style kept me caught up in the story line. Well worth reading and enjoy as you get lost in an Alexander Dumas kind of way.

The two main characters reminded me of Hawkeye and Cora in the movie The Last of the Mohicans. I lost interest in the storyline about halfway through reading it. I put the book down and as of this review I'm not sure whether or not I will finish reading it at a later date.

very beleveable story, it keeped me spelbound.

Excellent book !!!!!

this book was interesting...it has a few twists in there that kept you wanting to read further.I'd recommend this book for a good romance read

I took a few days over the holiday to read this as an escape from the family and work.In general, the story is well written and I did not find anything out of continuity. While I'm not a big fan of the french-Indian war era (history wasn't my strongest in school), I felt like the author captured the feel of the battles as well as the time period. The relationships between characters were a little cliche' -- but that goes with the territory of this genre.What I felt let-down with was the editing and the eBook formatting. There were several places in the book where the left-margins were misaligned, thus causing me to slow down and back up to re-read. Usually this was near a section with short lines of dialog. They typos weren't many, but enough so that I felt the book would have benefited from the editing of someone not familiar with the story.