Rebel

In the grand tradition of Sara Donati’s Into the Wilderness and Diana Gabaldon’s Voyager series, Cheryl Sawyer effortlessly weaves fact and fiction into an epic love story set against the dramatic backdrops of pre-revolutionary France and the American War of Independence. Interweaving the birth of a new nation with the destiny of two outsiders from another world, REBEL is both a passionate love story and a compelling portrait of late 18th-century France and frontier America. The fate of two unlikely lovers has a direct bearing on the events that link the two nations. The brilliant and beautiful Viviane de Chercy is in outright rebellion against the man who is about to snatch away her home, her fortune and her freedom. And Jules, the Comte de Mirandol, has been forced to return from the war in America to the very place where he first knew love, and lost it, years before. Their ideals of liberty are all they have in common. Desperate to escape her fate, Viviane stows away on a ship bound for the New World. Once there she falls hopelessly in love: first with the city of her dreams, Philadelphia; and then, when Jules joins the buckskin-clad Virginian Riflemen at the Battle of Brandywine, another kind of revolution takes place in her heart. Their story plays out against the backdrop of real events in France and America in 1776: France's secret arms deals with Congress, diplomatic conflicts at Versailles, transatlantic intrigue, the campaigns of the continental armies and some of the key battles of the early American Revolution, culminating at Saratoga. The cast of characters includes many great figures of the age: George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Benedict Arnold, Daniel Morgan, Pierre Caron de Beaumarchais and the extraordinary Marquis de La Fayette, who was only 19 when he sailed to America against the command of his King and influenced the fate of his own and his adopted country. La Fayette’s youthful notions about liberty ended up being as crucial to United States history as those of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington. Jules, torn between his duty in France and loyalty to his American friends, rejoins the Virginian Riflemen and throws himself back into war, but there is no escape from the truth that he is in love with a woman he cannot have. The story reaches its dramatic denouement early in 1778 on the day France signs her epoch-making alliance with the United States of America