If you or your teens were moved by the heroics of The Return of the King you might like to get to know the works of Rosemary Sutcliff. This volume, still in print, encompasses three stories set in the same geographical location, but spread across the centuries.
Warrior Scarlet is set in the Bronze Age, and is the coming-of-age story of a boy named Drem who is at the end of his three years in the boys' house. To be accepted as a man of his tribe Drem must kill his own wolf to wear the Warrior's Scarlet, but there is only one problem, how can he do this when his right arm is so useless? The story-telling is so detailed that the reader feels he is really there, in an ancient British tribe.
The Mark of the Horse Lord This novel was published too early, and in the wrong genre. Too early in the sense that there latterly has been a market for historical fiction; in the wrong genre in the sense that it is a complex, nuanced book that many adults would find satisfying--if they knew too look in the young adult ghetto (the same is true of many of Ursula Le Guin's novels).
The novel is set in Roman Britain, in the first century AD; it is the story of a part-bred Roman gladiator, Phaedrus, who is caught up in a political plot between the Queen of the Picts and the powers behind the throne of the Scots. He is enlisted to impersonate a cripple king (this becoming non-kingly), but as Phaedrus lives out the imposture, he rises comes to be the man he pretends to be. This is high, inspiring literature.
Knight's Fee, set in the era just after is a complex, moving story of one Randal, who was born and abandoned, but made a living as a "dog boy"--somehow, his predicament moves the jester Herluin, of de Belleme (sorry I don't know how to make the caret happen). Eventually he is adopted by the family of Bevis, a young knight; and when Bevis is killed in battle, Randal becomes the Knight of Dean. In the very best sense, this is a novel of growth and redemption, and the cost of love.
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