Within the Enemy's Line

Blue and the Gray Afloat #2

by Oliver Optic

In this second book of the six book Blue and the Gray Series the Civil War is well underway and Christy is busy preparing his father?s steam-yacht, Bellevite, for service in the Union navy.

Genres: Classics

351 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1889

About the author

Oliver Optic was the pen name of William Taylor Adams, a Massachusetts schoolteacher whose magazines and stories for children reached a very wide audience from the 1850s through the turn of the twentieth century.

Reviews

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sequal to Taken by the Enemy, a civil war series on the sea.

It was fun seeing what happened next to the characters, now that the war has begun in ernest, and father and son returned to the North. The beginning few chapters had a bit too much review for my likes, and were pretty much a rititeration of the entirety of book one. Despite that, however, I still enjoyed reading it through, and seeing how Christy and his southern friend, Paul Vapoor continue on in their training and adventures on board the steamer, the Belledite, and defending the North on the blockade.

Note: The author having written these books in the 1800's after the war, there were a couple small instances – one of Northern prejudice, and the other of racial prejudice/superiority towards the African Americans, that still hadn't all been settled this early on. Though Emancipation had occurred at the time the book would have been written, the Civil Rights movement had not. An interesting bit of written history preserved here...