Seeker by Arwen Elys Dayton

Seeker is a nail-biter of a book, full of action, hints of romance, and agonizing moral choices as three teens, Quinn, Shinobu, and John, struggle for control of time- and place-bending powers.  Quinn and Shinobu, upon taking their oaths as seekers, discover the darker side of their new responsibilities and want nothing more to do with them.  Escape is seen as betrayal and carries its own consequences, and John's desire to restore his family's legacy ultimately threatens to destroy Quinn, even though he loves her.  Great stuff!!

Burn by Walter Jury and Sarah Fine

Burn takes up where Scan, the story of a boy's fight to protect his father's invention, the scanner that can tell human from alien, leaves off.  The scanner is now in the hands of the H2 (alien) forces, but the enemy needs Tate to decipher his murdered father's coded files on how to use the technology and save the planet. Burn is a rollercoaster of a book, with Tate, a teenage version of television's MacGyver, struggling to outsmart his foes while evading capture himself.  There are action scenes galore, betrayals at the highest levels in the Fifty (the humans), arson, torture, and discovery of a new, even more lethal threat to earth's survival.  Impossible to put down.  

The Porcupine of Truth by Bill Konigsberg

New Yorker Carson Smith and  homeless Aisha Stinson meet at the Billings Zoo and strike up an immediate friendship.  Both teens are struggling to cope with their totally dysfunctional families, mainly with their fathers.  Carson's disappeared from his life when Carson was a young child and is now dying and Aisha's dad kicked her out because he cannot accept that she is gay.  The two of them decide to solve the mystery of Carson's grandfather, whom they suspect is still alive, although he deserted Carson's dad decades earlier. They embark on a cross country road trip which tests their ingenuity, their resilience, their sense of humor, and the strength of their relationship.

The Thicket by Joe. R. Lansdale

About 10 years ago HBO carried a series called Deadwood about the wild west as lived in Deadwood, South Dakota in the 1870's.   The series was memorable for its depiction of the squalor, ugliness, violence, and random acts of kindness in a free-wheeling frontier town .  The Thicket gives much the same feel, only this time in East Texas.  The story revolves around 16-year-old Jack Parker who loses his parents to smallpox, his grandfather to murder, and his sister to kidnapping by a band of low-lifes, all in a matter of days.  Determined to rescue his sister, Jack joins forces with a dwarf bounty hunter, his sidekick--a huge black man with an oversized shotgun, and, eventually, a prostitute, newly retired.  Their adventure has more than its share of evil doings by evil doers, all described in excruciating detail.  Nonetheless--or maybe because of--the slaughter and ever-present dangers, the book is hard to put down.  Jack tells his story with much dark humor and understatement, and he makes his partners at once engaging and ruthless.  Trigger warning:  some sex and frequent violence.

Scan by Walter Jury and Sarah Fine

Scan is all fast-paced action that pits a super smart and talented teen (think MacGyver with jui-jitsu skills) against a variety of ruthless agents that want what he has-- a super-secret piece of technology, developed by his father, that can tell the difference between humans and aliens.

Tate Archer finds the scanner while snooping in his father's lab and decides to take it to school, where it gets way too much attention.   He doesn't realize the import of what he's done until he, his father, and his girlfriend Christina are chased from the building by police who shoot to kill.  Someone in the school--probably an agent of the aliens, has turned them in.

Tate's father dies from a gunshot wound, and Tate and his immensely spirited and resourceful girlfriend run from the bad guys and struggle to stay ahead of pursuit while they figure out whom they can trust.   Tate's dad cautioned him about trusting any aliens (known as H2) or even the core group of pure humans--The Fifty--who stand against them.  Both sides want the scanner and are willing to destroy Tate and Christina to get it.

Suspense builds as inevitably the hunters close in.  Some of the strategies to escape imminent capture seem a bit far fetched to me, but I'm no chemist.  The non-stop action is tempered by talk of Tate's relationship with his girlfriend--yes, there is romance.  Overall, this is a fun summer read with, I suspect, a sequel in the works.

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson’s Steelheart is a a wild ride for a small group of insurgents fighting against the rule of cruel and violent Epics—humans who possess extraordinary powers such as flight, superhuman strength, and seeming invincibility.   Eighteen-year-old David watched as  Steelheart, an Epic who is immensely powerful, turns non-living things into steel and is impervious to guns, knives and fire, killed his father.  David has studied the Epics for 10 years and wants to join the Reckoners, who specialize in assassinating Epics, so together they can discover Steelheart’s weakness and destroy him.

Cover Art by Mike Bryan

The action takes place in a dystopian world, Newcago—formerly known as Chicago, shrouded in perpetual darkness thanks to the alliance between high Epics Steelheart and Nightwielder.  Some humans who are needed to run the basic functions of a government such as enforcement, providing power, and running the economy,  live above ground;  others less important or more of a threat survive in the tunnels underneath the city.  David comes from this underworld, having worked in a munitions factory throughout his childhood.  He carries with him his rifle, his knowledge of Epics and of Reckoners, and a deep desire for revenge.  When he becomes involved in an assassination attempt on the Epic Fortuity, the rebels take him prisoner.  He has to prove himself and sell the group on his plans to take on Steelheart.  Meanwhile, he also has to deal with a growing attraction to Megan, one of the members of the Reckoners.  (Note:  the dialog between these two is particularly clever.)

Gunfights, racing motorcycles, bolts of destructive forces from the hands of Epics make up the frequent action.  State of the art munitions are employed, along with an ongoing debate on the merits of rifles versus handguns.  Secondary characters are given enough personality and special talents to make them interesting.  The leader, Prof, is particularly mysterious.  How much power does he have and why is he reluctant to use it?  Personally, I liked the internal debate on whether the devil one knows (Steelheart) is actually preferable to whatever or whoever would replace him if the Reckoners succeed.  There are worse places to live than Newcago.  

Steelheart is a great combination of action, suspense, plot twists and a touch of romance. Great fun.

Those Who Wish Me Dead by Michael Koryta

I have a bad habit of peeking at the ending of suspenseful books somewhere around halfway through to see who makes it and who doesn't. By the end of Chapter 4 (page 41) of Those Who Wish Me Dead I was ready to see if 13-year-old Jace Wilson survives.  He is being pursued by some seriously evil bad guys--two brothers who epitomize the meaning of psychopath.  Brothers Jack and Patrick Blackwell are soulless killers who leave a trail of dead--and frequently tortured--victims who either witnessed their previous crimes or can identify them as they proceed to commit their next one.   Only three characters stand between them and their prey:  an instructor in wilderness survival skills, his wife, and a fire spotter. Outgunned and outthought at every turn,  Ethan Serbin struggles to keep his promise to protect the boy, but first he must find him.  Knowing his pursuers are getting closer, Jace, or Connor as he is now called, has run away from the group of troubled teens that he was placed in as part of a witness protection program.  He enlists fire spotter Hannah Faber to help him--and they flee deeper into the Montana mountains--and into the teeth of a growing forest fire.  How much more hopeless can a boy's chances of survival be?

Admittedly the book requires the reader to suspend belief in a number of plot twists--i.e., how Ethan's wife Allison can leave the hospital where she is recuperating from severe burns and a beating to guide a detective on horseback into the woods towards the fire.  Still,  this a great book for a day or two at the beach or a camping trip.  Come to think of it, students preparing for Outdoor Ed can pick up lots of useful wilderness skills before heading out. Recommended.

The Bear by Claire Cameron

Cameron's book about two young children, five-year-old Anna and three-year-old Stick, orphaned by a bear attack while canoe camping on an island in Algonquin Park, Ontario, is absolutely impossible to put down. The story is based on an actual event--the death of two people in 1991 in the park, and the fictionalized version builds on what was known about the attack and on details of the wilderness environment provided by the author who was once a ranger in the same park.  In this account, Anna is awake in the family's tent, listening to her parents quiet talk by the campfire when her mother starts to shout.  Soon thereafter, her father reaches into the tent, grabs Anna and her brother and throws them into a large cooler that the family carries with them to store food.  Cameron describes the attack and its aftermath through the eyes of the five-year old, who can't figure out why the bear (or large black dog, as she first thinks), is trying to get into the cooler and why her parents don't answer her calls for help.

Eventually the bear leaves and the children manage to get the lid open and crawl out.  Anna's and Stick's dad is not there and the camp is a mess.  Anna doesn't see her father, but she does spot his shoe stuck on a piece of meat like the leg of lamb she once saw in the refrigerator at home.  Why, she asks herself, would Daddy put his shoe on a leg of lamb?  The children's mother is still alive, although motionless.  She whispers to her daughter to "be brave" and to put her brother in the canoe and leave the island, because it's not safe.  The rest of the novel details this bewildered child's efforts to do what her Momma wants--to paddle away and then wait for her parents to come get them.  Anna has to draw on every ounce of will and devotion to her parents and baby brother to combat hunger, thirst and fear of the black dog's return.   She is alternately hot, freezing, hungry, angry, scared and delirious.  I must confess to peeking at the later chapters so that I could keep reading about the children's suffering.  This is a great book, although not recommended for reading before or during Outdoor Ed!

Ship Breaker, continued

This turned out to be fabulous adventure story! Nailer rescues a rich girl, Nita, from a sinking ship, and decides to help her find her way back to her people who head a large trading firm. His goal is complicated by the need to avoid his dad, a morally twisted and incredibly adept fighter and killer who wants to claim Nita as salvage. The setting is a fairly credible (except for the deliberately mutated half-men) post-environmental apocalypse world. The relationship between Nailer and Nita is challenging, given the vast difference in their social classes and education. A variety of other characters and and situations pop into and out of the this fast-paced narrative. All-in-all, a fun read.

Non-fiction for Cavers

We have several books on mountain climbing in the library--check No Shortcuts to the Top, Into Thin Air, Dead Lucky, High Crimes in the catalog--but until now we didn't have anything on caving, or extreme caving. Blind Descent is a book about caving explorers and scientists seeking to become the first to find the lowest place on earth. To succeed (and survive), they must deal with waterfalls, underground rivers, hypothermia, and the ever-present danger of losing their lights, if not their minds. The author, James M. Tabor, a sports journalist, delivers a fast paced and compelling adventure.