"Awesome" Adventures: Peg Kehret's Thrillers

For the eight- to twelve-year-old reader who just wants adventure, thrills, and a few chills, Peg Kehret is one author who can reliably deliver the action. Kehret has written dozens of fast-paced books in which the protagonists survive by their common sense and determination a variety of threats, from tsunamis to volcanoes to plain old bad guys. To her credit, Kehret doesn't write mere pot boilers; her novels have strong character development, a palpable sense of place, and an warm interconnectedness between the main characters and the family members, strangers, and animals who play roles in the stories.

Kehret's Frightmares series combines page-turning survival stories with a touch of science fiction to create surprisingly successful thrillers. For example, in The Blizzard Disaster, Janis Huff sets off for school on an unusually warm November morning. Fearing that her father plans to shoot her beloved blind mare Pansy while she is away, Janis grabs only a light sweater despite her mother's warnings that the weather could change. When the rain changes to snow and becomes the epic blizzard of 1940, Janis's father hitches his two horses, Jupiter and Pansy, to his wagon and searches for Janis until the blinding snow and drifts force him to release Pansy and turn back on Jupiter. When Pansy finds Janis half-frozen and collapsed in the snow, she uses her homing sense to get Janis back to her house and save her life.

To tie this historical fiction story to the modern reader, Kehret uses an element of science fiction in the characters of Warren and Betsy, modern kids whose time-switching device (which they name the "Instant Commuter") enables them to visit the Great Blizzard as part of a science report research. When the Instant Commuter is disabled by the sub-zero temperatures, they resourcefully warm it by setting a haystack afire and in the process manage to find Janis' little sister who has also wandered into the blizzard.

While the adult reader may find this second story line an improbably interjection into the primary plot, Kehret is a good enough writer to shift between the story lines without breaking the tension of the plot. Most readers of the series will accept the intervention of the time travelers as part of the fun and read on.

Love for animals plays a role in many of Kehret's adventure stores. In Searching for Candlestick Park, Spencer is forced to leave behind his much-loved cat Foxey when his down-on-her luck mom is forced to move them into his disgruntled aunt's crowded house. Spencer goes back to find his cat and with a stolen bike and little money sets off for Candlestick Park where he believes his distant father works and will take them in. Meeting injury, hunger, and muggers on his way, Spencer manages to find his father but learns that he is unwilling to make room for Spencer in his life. A chance encounter with a kind old man helps Spencer to find a way back home and into a better life for Foxey, his mom, and himself.

Peg Kehret takes on most of childhood's bugaboos, from ghosts to kidnappers, and shows average kids dealing rationally and effectively with them. Midplot the threats seem real, but at the conclusion the reader feels empowered by the characters' success in meeting them.

Kehret has also written a couple of popular nonfiction books for her readers. In Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio, Kehret recounts her slow and painful recovery from paralysis, an experience whose vividness gave her a lifelong immediate mental snapshot of the twelve-year-old persona which she writes about so effectively. In her book Shelter Dogs: Amazing Stories of Adopted Strays, she recounts the true stories of dogs rescued from euthanasia to become useful and even heroic animals. Dog lovers who enjoyed Gary Paulsen's My Life in Dog Years should find Shelter Dogs right down their dog run.