[AnAmericanMother]

If you like the action in Hornblower, you will LOVE the Jack Aubrey stories or Captain Marryat's Mr. Midshipman Easy. That book is definitely an adult story as too much of it would go right over a kid's head (Marryat gets in some serious licks against socialism -- in the early 1800s!) But a kid might really like one of his other books, The Children of the New Forest. A Cavalier's children are thought to be dead after the Puritans burn his house to the ground. But they are sheltered by an old family servant in a cottage in the New Forest. I enjoyed it very much as a child, and I have re-read it a couple of times.

[Tax-chick]

I've checked out Marryat novels on occasion, but none of the children has picked up on it. Patience, etc.

The Sharpe novels on the Napoleanic Wars might catch someone, eventually. I read them to Anoreth when she was a baby, but there's been no indication that it hit home, thus far. On the other hand, I read her the "National Review" and "American Spectator," and now she wants to be the next Ann Coulter.