Posts on adventure

It's Timeslip Tuesday again at Charlotte's Library, when Charlotte reviews time travel fiction for kids and invites others to do the same! Today I'd like to talk about one of my favorite books from childhood: Time Cat: The Remarkable Journeys of Jason and Gareth, by Lloyd Alexander.

Jason is an ordinary boy with, he thinks, an ordinary cat named Gareth. Until, that is, Jason wishes aloud that he had nine lives and Gareth speaks up! Cats don't really have nine lives, Gareth explains, but: "I can visit nine different lives. Anywhere, any time, any country, any century." What's more, he can take Jason, too.

Thus begins Jason and Gareth's rather whirlwind sampling of world history from a cat's and a boy's eye view. From Egypt in 2700 B.C.E. to America in 1775, the two adventure across every inhabited continent. They confront emperors, march in battle, face imprisonment, and lollygag with Leonardo da Vinci.

Meanwhile, Jason—and readers—learn about cats' role in the various cultures they visit. Cats in ancient Egypt are revered; those in medieval Germany are feared as creatures of the Devil. Some places they're regarded as good luck, other places bad; sometimes they're treated with affection, other times detested.

Time Cat is an unusual, entertaining, and informative middle grade adventure, much more light-hearted than Alexander's Prydain or Westmark sequences. What's more, it gets away from Alexander's plot and character formulas that have caused more than one person to ask: Why did Lloyd Alexander write the same book over and over again? Take a peek!

I know you've been lying awake at night wondering, "Spies versus pirates: who would win?"

After five days of my latest junior high fiction display, I'm here to tell you: spies all the way.

I can barely scrabble up enough spy books to keep the display semi-stocked. Meanwhile, not a single one of those pirate books has budged all week.

In fairness to pirates, our multiple copies of Kenneth Oppel's Airborn and Skybreaker are all checked out, as is Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson's Peter and the Starcatchers series.

Then again, so are 85% of our Alex Rider books, all our copies of Ally Carter's Gallagher Girl series, all our Young James Bond, and Jennifer Barnes' The Squad series.

I think the spies still come out ahead.

The past ten years have seen a veritable avalanche of books about the world’s tallest mountain. Why the sudden interest? Is it because of National Geographic’s movie Everest, or the deadly climbing disaster of 1996 chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air? Or because 2003 was the fiftieth anniversary of Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary’s historic summit? Or because in that same year a 15-year-old girl named Ming Kipa set the new record for youngest person to summit? Whatever the reason, there is no shortage of books, for all age levels, about the dangerously fascinating mountain that is Everest.

One of my favorite books of 2007 is Peak, by Roland Smith (Harcourt, 2007). This well-written page-turner for junior high readers follows the adventures of Peak Marcello, the 14-year-old son of climbers. After getting caught free-climbing – and then tagging – skyscrapers in Manhattan, Peak is whisked off to Asia, where his father leads climbing expeditions on Everest. At first, Peak is thrilled at the chance to be the youngest person ever to summit, but he soon learns the task ahead is more difficult than he imagined.

I’m not talking about physical dangers; in fact, readers may be surprised that a relatively inexperienced climber such as Peak could make it as far as he does without much in the way of illness or injury. (Some other climbers in the expedition are forced to stop due to HAPE and other climbing-related afflictions.) But Smith compensates with a solid exploration of the political issues surrounding Mount Everest. The commercialization of Everest (Can anyone who can pay play?), Chinese control of Tibet, and the incredibly dangerous – and under-appreciated – work of Sherpa guides all get ample discussion.

In a similar vein is Gordon Korman’s fictional Everest series (The Contest, The Climb, The Summit – Scholastic, 2002), for readers grades 5 and up who enjoy a fast read.

True Books About Everest

• Climbing Everest: Tales of Triumph and Tragedy on the World’s Highest Mountain, by Audrey Salkeld (National Geographic, 2003) –Children’s Literature calls these profiles of Everest’s most famous climbers “thrilling reading” for grades 4 and up.
• Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster, by Jon Krakauer (Villard, 1997) – This thick nonfiction page-turner has a lot of teen appeal.
• To the Top of Everest, by Laurie Skreslet with Elizabeth MacLeod (Kids Can, 2001) – One of the first Canadians to summit offers his cheerful and photo-filled account for grades 3 and up.
• To the Top: The Story of Everest, by Stephen Venables (Candlewick, 2003) – Photo-filled history of human interest in Everest, including the author’s personal summit story, for grades 4 and up.
• Within Reach: My Everest Story, by Mark Pfetzer and Jack Galvin (Dutton, 1998) – A teen’s mountain-climbing diary, with special focus on the Everest disaster, for junior high on up.

Luke Skywalker’s green, troll-like advisor (thank you, Trivial Pursuit Genus I) once said, “Adventure…excitement…a Jedi craves not these things.” And while I’d never be so much of a fool as to argue with Yoda, I do often get patrons seeking adventure in the form of books.

Whenever I have a patron looking for an “adventure book”, the first question I ask is, “Spies, pirates, or survival?” I mean, when you think about it, “adventure” is possibly the most nebulous genre label out there. According to Random House, an adventure is “an exciting or very unusual experience.” That covers just about everything, from kidnapping to war to getting carried off by a twister to a magical land full of short people. Who’s publishing books about boring people these days, anyway? (Wait – don’t answer that.)

My trichotomy isn’t perfect, I realize. It basically ignores books that fall into some other neat genre category – historical fiction, fantasy, etc. But it covers what teachers are expecting, and let’s face it: when a child or parent asks, “Where are your adventure books?”, it has school assignment written all over it. (I’ll leave my opinion of required genre reading for another post.)

Anyway, this how I distinguish spies, pirates, and survival:

1. Spies – Helicopters, guns, and international intrigue. Generally contemporary.
2. Pirates – Shiver me timbers, this speaks for itself. Generally historical.
3. Survival – Kid versus nature, wild animals and/or crazy people in any day and age.

The plan is to follow up this post with some examples in each category, with particular emphasis on books boys like! Let’s see if I can stick to it.

First Light, by Rebecca Stead (Random House, 2007) is one of the best books I’ve read this year with obvious cross-gender appeal. By “one of the best”, I mean not only is it well-written, with an interesting premise and three-dimensional characters, it’s a page-turner. I carried it around with me, just waiting for a spare moment in which to sneak another peek. I’m confident it will have the same effect on many upper middle grade readers, too.

First Light follows the lives of two young characters, Peter and Thea, who live in separate worlds. Peter lives in modern-day New York City, while Thea lives in a time and place we can’t quite pin down. All we know is it’s foreign. Cold. Dark. A colony enclosed by ice, called Gracehope.

Both Peter and Thea are looking for answers. Peter seems perfectly ordinary, except for his headaches, which are accompanied by strange visions. There is, however, the question of his mother’s depression, which seems tied to the red notebook she’s always writing in but won’t let Peter see.

As for Thea, she’s concerned for Gracehope’s future. Her people came to Gracehope seven generations ago, and have grown greatly in number. How will they survive without leaving Gracehope and entering the “wider world” to find a bigger place to live, with greater resources? Unfortunately, the elders of Gracehope, particularly Thea’s grandmother, are completely resistant to exploring that option.

It isn’t until Peter and his parents visit Greenland – ostensibly for his father to study global warming, while his mother writes a book on mitochondrial DNA – that Peter and Thea’s worlds are set on a collision course, and all their questions are answered. The hows and whys are the mystery that will drive readers onward.

The Library of Congress has cataloged First Light as an adventure story, but I’m going to call it science fiction. It’s speculative, involving situations and technology outside current reality. Aside from a touch of prophecy, all explanations are scientific rather than magical in nature. It does have elements of adventure and mystery, but I think it shares most of its appeal with speculative fiction such as Lois Lowry’s Giver trilogy, Margaret Peterson Haddix’s Running Out of Time and Shadow Children series, and – the parallels will be obvious to any reader – Jeanne Du Prau’s City of Ember. And boy howdy, do those books have a lot of fans, many of whom would probably enjoy First Light!

To be critical for a moment, the “scientific” elements of the story were, to me, the least interesting or plausible. Without giving too much away, Peter’s mother’s mitochondrial DNA explanation for Gracehope’s people works for the present-day, but I wasn’t sure why it was necessary for the founder of Gracehope to have known about it as well (down to the double-helix, even!). That, along with certain other technology "invented" by the founder, seemed almost magical in an otherwise fairly grounded story. Meanwhile, global warming provides a compelling reason for Peter’s family’s visit to Greenland, but I didn’t feel the full weight of global warming’s consequences for Gracehope. This is probably because the story ends without Gracehope’s people confronting the truth themselves.

If one doesn’t dig too deeply into pragmatics, however, there’s plenty to enjoy here for both boys and girls, grades 6-or-so and up. I look forward to adding it to my library’s list of recommended science fiction titles and talking it up next time someone asks me, “Read any good books lately?”

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The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp, by Rick Yancey, seems like the kind of book that should fly off the shelves. Yet our paperback copies hadn't budged for weeks, I noticed. Time for me to pick it up myself and see what it was all about, so I could give it the talking-up it warrants.

Sixteen-year-old Alfred Kropp doesn’t exactly seem like hero material (except, perhaps, that he’s an orphan). He isn’t smart, handsome, or brave, and he’s a terrible athlete. So why is it suddenly up to Alfred to save the world?

Call it being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Drooling at the possibility of a million-dollar pay-off, Alfred’s Uncle Farrell ropes him into stealing an artifact from wealthy Mr. Samson. It isn’t until after sword-wielding monks attack him and Uncle Farrell ends up dead that Alfred realizes he’s made a huge mistake.

The artifact is the sword Excalibur, legendary sword of King Arthur. Whoever wields it cannot be defeated. And now it’s fallen into the wrong hands. The worst hands, actually – those of Mogart, a knight gone bad. The future of all mankind is in danger, just because Alfred wasn’t brave enough to tell his uncle, “No.”

What follows is a rip-roaring adventure full of sword-fighting, high-speed car chases, and double crosses, as Alfred joins forces with Bennacio, last of the Order that protected Excalibur for a thousand years. Meanwhile, agents of the mysterious (and mysteriously named) OIPEP have their own designs on getting the sword, but are they allies or enemies? And on his journey, Alfred learns there’s a lot more to heroism than being a kick-ass sword fighter.

Coming in at nearly 350 pages, The Extraordinary Adventures of Alfred Kropp felt slightly long to me, but one action sequence after another keeps those pages turning. Readers will also appreciate the fine taste in automobiles (how many sixteen-year-olds get to test drive a Mercedes, a Ferrari, a Jaguar, and a Lamborghini?), the slightly gory fight scenes, and Alfred’s deadpan humor. For example:

“That was just a lucky punch,” [Barry] gasped, and he slapped my hand away.
“The odds are against that,” I answered. “I’ve never had too much luck.”

Alfred Kropp lives up to the bar set by the Indian Jones movies and, dare I say, exceeds the quality of many other popular adventure tales involving ancient artifacts in modern times (Da Vinci Code or Librarian: Quest for the Spear, perchance?) Suggest it to spy adventure and mythology fans in the 10-14 age range. It shares appeal with the Alex Rider adventures, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, and even Artemis Fowl.

Meanwhile, HipWriterMama just posted a terrific interview with author Rick Yancey! Take a gander to get background on Alfred Kropp, the scoop on its sequels, and plenty of other interesting trivia.