Betsy and the Emperor

by Staton Rabin

Book Overview

"Think, my dear -- just think what it will be like, to be known as the girl who freed the great Napoleon Bonaparte "

Fourteen-year-old English girl Betsy Balcombe and her family have an unusual houseguest: Napoleon Bonaparte, former emperor of France and the most feared man on earth. Once lord and master to eighty-two million souls, now, in 1815, Napoleon is a captive of the British people. Stripped of his empire and robbed of his young...

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 141691336X
• ISBN13: 9781416913368
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 4.2" x 7.0"
• Age Range: 10 to 13 years
• Grade Range: Grades 5 to 8

Customer Reviews

Excellent Book!!!

I think this is a great book which tells about history in a great and exciting way. Staton Rabin has outdone herself! I can only hope that she will come out with another book as good as this one. Her characters are very interesting and I loved reading about them. Anyone who doesn't like history will like it after they read this amazing book which combines history in a facinating way.

This book made me really like Napoleon!

This book makes you see Napoleon Bonaparte as something more than an evil ruler. I couldn't stop reading this book; it was awesome! It's a mix of a romance novel and a history novel. This book's well written. When Napoleon is captured he is sent to St. Helena. There he stays with the Balcombe family. The family has two girls and two boys. Napoleon gradually becomes friends with the youngest girl, Betsy. This book has such an emotional ending; I almost cried. I highly recommend this book. It could please anyone especially history lovers.

Betsy and the Emperor

I highly suggest this book, Betsy and the Emperor. It shows that two opposite people can have a strong compassion for each other. Characters have tension between each other that they must overcome, such as being free of the vast mountains and valleys of ST. Helena, or being stuck there with the one you love. After someone important dies Boney doesn't have a very good chance of escaping. Stricter Laws and Rules are then set on what the Emperor Boney can do. Out side her house when she got back from boarding school she recognized a sickly-sweet smell. Betsy has to make tough decisions and she doesn't always make the right choices. Now it is up to you to find out what happens to the Emperor Boney and Betsy. By: Taylor Farley (6th grade)

Betsy Balcombe and the Emperor of Doom

This new young adult (YA) novel is a historical fantasy based on Napoleon's earliest years on St. Helena. Ms. Rabin has reimagined Napoleon's exile through the eyes of fourteen-year-old Betsy Balcombe, the tomboyish daughter of a British official living on the distant South Atlantic island. Freshly returned to St. Helena from a boarding school in England, Betsy, while on one of her adventures, sees the arrival of a ship in the island's port of Jamestown. Investigating the commotion -Are pirates raiding the port? -Is the island being invaded? -Betsy discovers that, in a way, there is an invasion. Napoleon has landed, but as a prisoner of the British; isolated on a tiny, rocky island in the back of beyond and guarded by more than 2000 British troops and a small fleet of warships. Betsy discovers that Napoleon has come to the Balcombe's home, known as The Briars, to live. Betsy and General Bonaparte, as the British insist on calling him, are about to find their lives intersecting. Eventually they will enter into a sort of conspiracy together. From the first Napoleon plays both the ogre-a role Napoleon, at times, seems to revel in-and the aggrieved ex-Emperor. Betsy, recently released from her own prison of a English boarding school, finds herself, in a sense, in just a bigger prison formed of both the size of the an island that Napoleon once described as "petit" and by the expectations of those around her towards a girl entering into young womanhood. As Betsy says, she was "not at all aspiring to proper young ladyhood." Betsy, at first, is unimpressed by the former conqueror, but Napoleon, employing the charm he was reported of being capable of, eventually wins Betsy over. Betsy is unimpressed with Napoleon's glory, considering him as a "man who had brought so much misery upon the world. Who never did anything of value, nor gave a thought to anyone but himself." To Betsy, whose fellow students at school had lost fathers and brothers in the wars, Napoleon is little more than a "professional murderer." As Betsy spends more time with the new arrival and learns more about Napoleon her opinion of her fellow prisoner begins to change. For his part, Napoleon at first teases the teenaged girl, calling her "monsieur" when he catches her riding astride rather than the sidesaddle proper for a young woman. But Napoleon sees Betsy (perhaps as he saw himself around Betsy's age) as someone who is "trapped... like a good actress in a very bad play. You dream [he tells her] of doing great things, but no one expects it of you. Your heart aches to break free-and write your own destiny on the wind... someday they will see what they have missed in you-you will make them see. And they will be sorry." Gradually the rebellious Betsy, whose older sister is one of those who Betsy wants to make sorry, begins to have some grudging admiration for the rebellious general. Under the influence of the Balcombe family's half-mad, half-French tutor, Huff, Betsy enter

Wonderful book

This is a wonderful book. I would recommend it for both adult and young adult readers. Even you don't care a hoot about Napoleon or about history, for that matter, you will swept away by this novel. Betsy is everything you want a 14 year old girl to be, sassy and bright and intuitive and rebellious. Napoleon is, well, Napoleon...a huge historical figure, but wrought here in a way that renders him entirely human (and a fascinating person at that). Staton Rabin takes facts and fiction and blends them up in this novel into a wonderful mix, more true than truth in the end (which is what great fiction does). This is such an interesting novel. It cooks along and is entirely quirky and compelling--just as a "coming of age" story for Betsy. But it is so much more than that. It is about how the grand scale of history is tipped every day by the ordinary, how huge historical figures are, in the end, simply human. It is fast paced, well written, funny, moving, quirky and wild. It is a pleasure to be in Staton Rabin's head and in her heart and in the world that she creates with this book. This is a gem of a novel. I'm giving it to some great young adults that I know (who will eat it up!). I'm also passing it along to some adults that I know will relish it!