Here, as you begin to read, is Sherwood Forest, where John Scarlock still feels in his veins the tug of the blood of Robin Hood's men. Here, in Nottingham in the year 1628, John loves the orphan Joan, and does not wait for any man to say a prayer over their love, and promises that she shall follow him to the New World. Here is New Hampshire in America, where men loyal to the king and his church build a happy land that honors both the spirit and the flesh, till the godly men of Massachusetts come with laws to still their neighbors' laughter, where a strange little girl named Nan boasts that her mother was the first harlot in Portsmouth, and where Joan bears John a son and calls him Will. Here is London, when young Will returns to his father's England in the year of the plague, where a girl in a scarlet dress plays her lute and sings to keep her city gay, while the street-voices cry "Bring out your dead!" Here is the Goose Fair Wedding, old as England, and ill-omened, at which Will and the singing girl, Doll, are joined together in haste and carnival joy. Here is the Great Fire of London, when all the living gather to watch the mighty timbers of St. Paul's burn and totter, when Doll's lute is found in the ashes, when Will finds Nan and loves her, and knows the sin of hoping his wife is dead. Here is the odd little house on London Bridge, where Doll returns to him, and Will must make his sorrowful choice. And here is the story of the strange, unholy happenings in New Hampshire when Will and Doll and Nan come home to live, the story of three who sinned against God as the Puritans knew Him, but still hoped for "happiness in spite of Hell." - Jacket flap.

The author of the well-received Peace, My Daughters, leaves the specialty field and enters that of historical fiction on a broader scale. For this is a novel of the 17th century, of new for a new country and of their growing into it. John Scarlock leaves his loved in Nottingham to help to colonize New Hampshire; his beloved Joan follows him there, and with him fights the domination of the godly who would subjugate Strawberry Bank. Their only son, Will, when John dies, leaves Harvard to become the man of the family and follow his father's faith in the forests of their home, goes to England to get the commission for masts and to decide in which land to cast his lot. Through the plague he meets Doll and marries her but with the great fire he knows his real love is for Nan, and New Hampshire his heart's home. Back in Portsmouth (the new name for Strawberry Bank) it is Doll who saves the mast trade when the godly would ruin Will and who gives him the chance to have his Nancy. The love of a sown field, the stubborn, bitter and unruly men of the old, hard days, the poor little ships that brought them to the wilderness, and the women to whom the men are all -- caught here with simplicity and dignity and a certain poetic magic. - Kirkus Reviews.