Challenges and Consequences: A Talent for Trouble by Natasha Tarrant

Three young people, all very different.
All searching for something, though none knew quite what.
All unaware, as yet, that they might find it in one another.

A school bus was supposed to meet them at Castlehaig, but when they got off the train, it wasn't there.
"Late," said Jesse bitterly. "It's not fair!"

Alice looked at him curiously, and he realized with a start that she didn't know about the First Day Challenge."

Since her mother's death, Alice Mistlethwaite had retreated into her own world of reading and writing fantasy tales. Now that she is eleven, her aunt and her father Barney have decided Alice needs to be forced out of her shell. They summarily decide to sell her much-loved house, Cherry Grange, where she can pick summer cherries from a tree at her window, and Alice is put on a train to a boarding school in Scotland. Aunt Patience has found a teaching job in London, and her father, a famously unsuccessful actor, is off, "on-tour," and Alice finds herself on a train headed for Stormy Loch Academy with a pleasant but peculiar passenger named Jesse. Jesse's chief skill, she learns, is  the ability to run really fast--an unfair advantage, as Alice discovers when Jesse jumps out of the school van and at top speed dashes toward the medieval-looking Stormy Loch School. It seem the last one to touch the school door suffers a Consequence.

It was only fair that she should have known. But sometimes it just feels impossible to do what is right. Jessie ran like a champion on his long, strong legs. Alice, in contrast... did not run like an athlete. She looked more like a small and furious terrier.

And then Jesse stumbled and fell. Alice sailed past him. She could see the door, the lion's head knocker gleaming....

And then Fergus Mackenzie, the red-haired genius and breaker of rules, stuck his foot right in her path.

Justice of a sort is meted out by the headmaster, Major Fortescue. Alice, the last to arrive, receives the Consequence of having to sound the early morning Reveille Gong for the semester, and for his perfidy Fergis is appointed Pig Keeper. Alice gains revenge for the unfairness of it all by banging the gong, not three times but continually until all sleeping students are awake and stumbling outside into the chilly dark for what they think is a fire drill, and Fergus finds a perverse satisfaction in enjoying the pigs. As the semester goes by, Alice also discovers that Stormy Loch "continues better than expected." and the three of them forge a connection born out of misdeed and mischief which leads to a truce and an unexpected friendship.

But visitation day arrives and Alice's father fails to show up as promised. What she does receive is a mysterious package with a heavy, tightly wrapped small object labeled DO NOT OPEN, and a letter from her father exhorting her to meet him with that object on the small island of Nish, off the coast of Scotland, a place where he purportedly remembers a castle and moat from his childhood.

And then, an opportunity presents itself. It is time for the Year Seven Great Orienteering Challenge, and Major Fortesque groups Alice, Jesse, and Fergus together, thinking they "might learn from each other," and indeed they do.

Alice persuades the boys to accept her plan to meet her father at Nish, sneaking away from the island of Lumb and faking their way onto the ferry, using their classroom French to pretend to be foreign students on holiday. But what seemed like a lark turns into a survival test, as a mighty storm strikes the tiny island. Their tent is blown away, and the three friends realize that they are being pursued by a gang of continental art thieves who rightly believe Alice's package contains a stolen museum piece. The promised castle turns out to be a towering rock formation surrounded at high tide by a moat of roiling sea water, and the three find themselves finally escaping the gang down the cliff by rope. It is indeed much more of a challenge than Major Fortescue had planned, and Alice, Jesse, and Fergus forge an unshakable bond of friendship in the process.

In the style of British boarding school stories, the three friends from Stormy Loch form a close relationship in the best tradition of Harry Potter, Hermione, and Ron, relying on each other's strengths in an adventure not quite like any other, in Natasha Tarrant's forthcoming A Talent for Trouble (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Clarion, 2019). A real page-turner of a novel of three friends who pool their strengths and against all odds, come together in an amazing journey, this is a brilliant coming-of-age story that commingles unusual settings and developing emotional maturity in a great choice for those middle readers eager for unusual adventures without a single fantastical beast, mythic warrior, or evil sorcerer.

Summit Fever! Ascent (A Peak Marcello Adventure) by Roland Smith

We moved quickly, as Zopa suggested, without a word between us. At the eleventh flag, there was a deafening roar. "Run!" Josh shouted.

You can't outrun an avalanche. Josh grabbed me by the shoulder and turned me into the wall of snow and ice. "Climb it! Swim up!" he shouted.

The white wall smacked into me.

PITCH-DARK.

Peak Marcello hadn't exactly planned to summit Myanmar's formidable peak, Hkakabo Razi. This trip was supposed to be just an exotic vacation hike through Myanmar's tangled rain forest with his adventuring companions Nick and Alessia and guide Ethan.

But that hike is no walk in the park. Leeches, worms that borrow under the skin, and clouds of mosquitoes are just small nuisances compared to huge venomous snakes and a murderous guide whose pack elephant erupts in a killer rage from time to time,  a guide who cuts the rope bridges over gorges and who gets himself murdered, stranding them in the midst of nowhere; but when Nick suffers a severe concussion and Alessia goes along on the airlift to Yangon, Peak's jaunt through the jungle seems to be at an end.

But when the mysterious monk Zopa turns up with climbing gear and his two trusty Sherpa strongmen, Peak can't resist the old climber's suggestion that they try to climb Hkakabo's 19,250 foot summit. And at their first rest camp, Peak discovers that his father, Josh Wood, who has just completed the "Seven Summits" challenge ending in Everest, is also scaling Hkakabo Razi with a photography team. Peak has had almost no contact with his father throughout his life, and he neither trusts nor admires Josh, except for his mountaineering skills. But having come this far, he decides to go on with the climb. Peak manages to dig himself out of a sudden avalanche with his lucky spoon in his pocket, and when he recovers, he decides to go on with the ascent to the summit.

Weather worsens when they are a thousand feet below the summit, with rising temperatures that make the ice weak and the atmosphere foggy. Zopa and the Sherpas go ahead to place the protection pins, leaving Peak with his father to cross a glacier. Then things go downhill fast.

I fell over the edge while I was clipping into the rope. Josh's hand reached out and grabbed me by the wrist. The only thing between me and death was his strength.

Peak remembers what his mother has said about Josh. "At the end of your rope, there is no one better. Unfortunately, he doesn't pay much attention until you're dangling."

Peak is dangling.

"Let me go," I said. "No use in us both going over."

"I'm not letting you die alone," said Josh. "Try! Save me!"

It's again a cliffhanger in Roland Smith's forthcoming third book in series, Ascent (A Peak Marcello Adventure) (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018). For fans of flat-out wild adventures in far places, it's hard to beat Smith's Peak Marcello Adventures, written with world-wide settings and fast and furious extreme survival scenes. Author Smith, however, doesn't totally neglect the other valleys and peaks in adolescence, working in relationships with his concerned mother, his difficult father, his independent girlfriend Alessia, and his own internal conflict over competing with a father who is a celebrity climber. With this one, it seems clear that Peak has much to learn about himself and more mountains yet to climb.

Previous books in this series are Peak (A Peak Marcello Adventure) and The Edge (A Peak Marcello Adventure) (see review here).

The World On Fire: Ocean of Fire:The Burning of Columbia, 1865 by T. Neill Anderson

Joseph LeConte didn't know what to make of Davis. His assistance on the trip to Columbus was admirable, but Joseph wasn't completely sure if he could trust him.

Joseph LeConte had traveled through the enemy lines to Augusta, Georgia, to bring his widowed sister Jane and her children to stay with them in Columbia, South Carolina, and when they arrived at the station as the train to Columbia was beginning to pull away, a Confederate officer named Charles Davis had stopped the train and helped them board. But now, weeks later, here was Davis approaching the LeConte house.

As he greeted him and invited him inside, Joseph wondered how Davis had found his house

"Oh, Dr. LeConte, you know I have my ways of finding things out," he said with a wink. "it is terribly important that you and your family leave Columbia at once," Davis said in a low voice. "The Yankees will likely arrive in the city tomorrow."

Nearby, Mary Ann, one of family's domestic slaves, crouched on the other side of the kitchen door, her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide.

"I've been in the Yankee camp all day," Davis continued, "and I know their plans." Davis was silent for a few moments. "I fear to tell you what scenes will be enacted in Columbia, Dr. LeConte. "Staying here can only bring sorrow."

Also listening to this conversation was seventeen-year-old Emma LeConte, hidden at the top of the stairs. She and her father were both wary of trusting Davis, who seemed to know the plans of both the Confederate and Yankee generals. But he had promised to assure the safety of their house and LeConte's brother's house, and prepared for the worst, the women moved into the basement, and hoped for the best, while Joseph LeConte set out for the Confederate lines with a wagonload of chemicals and medicines from the hospital, leaving only their servant Henry as the only man at the house.

"Henry," Mary Ann whispered to him, "What you think we gonna have to do when they come? I mean..., we gonna leave?"

"Ain't convinced we should," Henry said. "Them Yankees may be fightin' for us, but they ain't our friends."

The loyalties of the enigmatic, probable double agent spy Charles Davis were unknown, but his warnings were real. Columbia was the proverbial tinderbox--the state capital of South Carolina, the prime mover of the rebellion, and its business district was awash with harvested cotton bales, which the Confederates planned to burn to keep them from profiting their enemies. But Sherman's army swept in across the Congaree River and took the town before the Southern militia could burn all the bales. Buried near the river were huge quantities of armaments, and as the out-of-control and soon drunken Yankees began to loot the city, they ripped the bales open, letting the autumn winds scatter the cotton until the city looked like it had been hit by a snowstorm. Inevitably, fires began, especially as the looters spilled out barrels of alcohol into the streets from the stores and taverns. Soon most of the central city was ablaze.

In T. Neill Anderson's Horrors of History: Ocean of Fire: The Burning of Columbia, 1865 (Charlesbridge, 2014) the city is on fire, hospital and churches, the capital building itself, and the remaining residents see their houses first ransacked for food and valuables and then lost to the fire that lit the night sky with walls of flames. Based on first-person recollections, the accounts of both Joseph and Emma LeConte, as well as Reverend Anthony Porter, this novel shows both acts of malice and mercy from both sides. The LeConte and Porter houses survived the blaze, thanks to the protection of  the mysterious Davis and Union officer, Lieutenant McQueen, but were looted, as was even the modest cabin of Mary Ann and Henry, in a day of destruction that reduced the graceful city to ruins. There were heroes and villains on both sides, with the war-weary Union soldiers, under the relentless General Sherman, willing to do whatever they had to do to end the war, and the citizens of Columbia desperate to defend their homes and families. Some slaves left, eager to join the Union Army, and some were taken from their families against their will to serve the Yankees. Columbia's burning was only one chapter in the horrors of this particular bit of history.

Despite its impeccable eyewitness sources, Anderson's writing in this first book in the Horrors of History series lacks the pulse-quickening immediacy of his narrative in later titles in the series such as Horrors of History: People of the Plague: Philadelphia Flu Epidemic 1918 and Horrors of History: City of the Dead: Galveston Hurricane, 1900, burdened and bolstered as it is with many characters and shifting points of view from many voices.  Still, as a supplemental reading for American history students, it offers authentic primary sources and has a lot to say about the destructiveness of war. An appended epilogue recounts the later lives of the main characters and the eventual reconstruction of the city of Columbia.

Storm of the Century: City of the Dead: Galveston Hurricane, 1900 by T. Neill Anderson

The young reporter sat in a small rowboat in Galveston Bay, not believing his eyes. Human bodies bumped against the boat. This is what the end of the world looks like, he thought.

He finally reached the shore on the south side of the island. He stood on the beach and watched men pull bodies from the sand. One man in particular was struggling to lift the tiny body of a very young boy. Something was keeping the body buried in the sand. Seeing a length of clothesline around the boy's waist, he pulled on the line. Yet another body emerged--a girl this time, also with clothesline tied around her waist. The man followed the line. After more digging the man unearthed two more girls, locked in a horrified embrace, their wet hair intertwined.

Trembling, through his tears he saw that the last boy was holding on to something. The man pulled once again on the line. It was the body of a nun. Her eyes were open, gazing up at the sky.

Young readers in middle and high school no doubt remember something of the destruction and misery caused by Hurricane Katrina and Super Storm Sandy, but even these storms pale in comparison to the grim statistics of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Coming at the dawn of the twentieth century, communication was limited to telegraph and local telephone systems, and no one on the offshore island of Galveston had any idea what was about to strike the virtually defenseless city, the largest in Texas at the time, that rose less than five feet above sea level at its highest point. The town was accustomed to wind storms, and despite a few oddities about this storm, almost no one expected what was about to hit them.

On the day before the hurricane, Dr. Sam Young, a weather hobbyist, walked the four blocks from his house to the Gulf beach and noticed something unusual.

He watched the rising water lapping at the streetcar trestle. The rain was really falling, and the increasing wind was coming from the north. Normally when the wind came from the north, the tide would be low.  On Wednesday the tide was high and the water was rough, but the air was completely still. Something in the Gulf must be pushing the water. Thursday was the same--but one thing was different--a haziness in the atmosphere. Sam knew that usually preceded a serious storm.

And what followed was what we now call a perfect storm.

T. Neill Anderson's Horrors of History: City of the Dead (Charlesbridge) tells the true story of survivors and victims of the most devastating storm ever to strike North America in terms of destruction and death.  Sam Young himself survived, after retreating from the waters that crept up to the top floor of his house, by wrenching a door from the top floor balcony off its hinges and riding it like a raft until the wind and water ripped it apart, forcing him to swim to the pile of debris forming at the center of the island. Only a few hours after they had played in the water rising from the beach, orphan boys William, Frank, and James disobeyed Sister Elizabeth's urging that they tie themselves to her as St. Mary's Orphanage disintegrated around them, and were miraculously discovered alive the next day, clinging to an unrooted tree several miles out in the Gulf of Mexico. And Daisy Thorne, her mother, and a few neighbors clung to her bed as the building crumbled, except for her bedroom. Few buildings survived the hurricane, and the thousands of bodies made the formerly prosperous and beautiful city a place of horror for the survivors.

Author T. Neill Anderson follows the story of other characters, some imagined, who were less fortunate than these survivors, as falling buildings, blowing debris, and ocean waves took their lives in a relentlessly realistic portrait of the biggest natural disaster in American history. That Galveston rebuilt itself is a testament to human resilience, one that young readers will surely recognize. Anderson's provides a map, an appended epilogue and author's notes which revisits his survivors and provides the subsequent story of the city's revival, but stands as a warning to what happens without the communication and social structure we now try to maintain against natural disasters.

Even reluctant readers will find themselves in the grip of this story, unable to stop turning those pages, as this historical event plays itself out in this grim but highly readable piece of riveting historical fiction.

High Adventure: The Edge by Roland Smith

"How did you know I would say yes?" I asked.

"I did not know." Zopa answered.

"So you agreed to lead this climb on the off chance that I would say yes?"

Zopa nodded. "But I hoped you would say no. You should not have come. You should not have brought your mother."

"Why?"

"This is not going to be a good climb."

"How do you know?"

Zopa shrugged. "A feeling. I can smell a bad climb."

"You smelled it all the way from Kathmandu?" I laughed.

When Peak Marcello's mother readily agrees to do the "Peace Climb" in Afghanistan organized by a billionaire philanthropist, fifteen-year-old Peak, coming off an almost deadly Everest ascent and a wild skyscraper-scaling prank, has his doubts. But the lure of climbing and the offer of revolutionary climbing gear seals the deal for him. His mom, once nicknamed "The Fly," is a famous climber, and the presence of Zopa, the Sherpa monk who guided the Everest climb, reassures Peak and reinforces his urge to combine his passions for climbing and promoting world peace.

But the signs are not favorable when the hastily-assembled team meet together in Afghanistan. Rivalries surface almost immediately between the egotistical climbmaster Phillip and ex-Marine Ethan and between Peak and some of the young climbers over the attentions of Alessia, comely daughter of the French ambassador to Afghanistan. The lack of climbing experience among the videographers' team and some of the young volunteers seems to concern Zopa, but they begin to trek out across the scrum, small boulders that make even walking treacherous, toward their chosen cliff. Zopa, a Tibetan monk who "does not sleep, at least not in the way we do," sticks to his sober premonitions about this climb.

But the biggest threat is not the mountain itself, but a band of Afghani thugs who kill several in their party and seize Peak's mother, Alessia, Zopa, and some of the climbers as bait for their ransom scheme. Peak has no option but to ally himself with Ethan, whose many talents in more than mountaineering turn out to be critical in tracking down the murderous gang across the rugged landscape. The trek itself is almost fatal to the two, and Peak can't help but notice that they seem to be shadowed by a shen, a snow leopard, as they find shallow graves with the bodies of some of their group behind the kidnappers. With his mom's fate in the hands of the killers, Peak knows there is no other choice but to follow their trail and hope to overcome them.

Everything is in line for a literal cliffhanger of a conclusion, and Roland Smith's forthcoming The Edge (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015), does not disappoint, with an ending that, believe it or not, involves the talismanic shen and a parasail.

Dedicated fans of all-out thriller novels will find this one a worthy sequel to Smith's first book, eponymously titled Peak, in which the intrepid Peak and his Buddhist guru are introduced. Author Smith has some difficulty working the necessary details of extreme mountain climbing into the narration, making for slow some passages that may entice thrill-seeking readers to skip to the chase, but rock-climbing devotees will likely relish the every bit of the technical minutiae. With the iconic shen as both a spiritual symbol and an active character in the concluding pages, the ending is anything but predictable. The likelihood of a future "edgy" Peak sequel, however, is not.

"Extreme sports meets ruthless killers in a survival-of-the-fittest chase," says School Library Journal.

Return of the Swamp Zombie: Skink--No Surrender by Carl Hiaasen

No more than three inches of the straw was exposed from the sand, but that was enough to pinch between my fingers. When I pulled it out of the mound, the in-and-out noise stopped.

But then, as I was peering at the spot where the soda straw had been in the sand, the turtle nest basically exploded. A full-grown man shot upright in a spray of sand. Built like a grizzly, he was coughing and swearing and spitting through a long, caked beard. On his head he wore (I swear) a flowered plastic shower cap. Even weirder, his left eye and right eye were pointed in different directions.

I vaulted back over the ribbon. After catching my breath, I asked, "What are you doing here?"

"Gagging, thanks to you."

"Dude, you can't sleep in a turtle nest!" I shouted.

In Carl Hiaasen's latest young adult novel, Skink--No Surrender (Alfred A. Knopf Books, 2014), fourteen-year-old Richard is introduced to one of Carl Hiaasen's iconic characters, swamp hermit Skink, former Vietnam vet and Florida governor, whose mission has become, to put it politely, avenging ecological transgressions. Sleeping concealed in a fake turtle nest to catch illegal egg pillagers, Skink's repose is interrupted by Richard on a round of nest inspections near his home.

Richard has been walking the beach, worrying about his cousin and best friend Malley, who apparently has disappeared impulsively on the way to boarding school in New Hampshire ("I don't do cold!") and whom Richard suspects has run away with an unsavory Instagram stalker who calls himself Talbo Chock, a name which a bit of googling turns out to be the stolen identity of a Marine killed in Afghanistan.

When Malley finally calls him, she tells Richard she's with a "friend," T.C., waiting for a drawbridge to open. Richard hears a ship's horn in the background and infers that she is somewhere along the Florida panhandle coast, and, telling his mother he's gone camping with a friend, heads off toward the nearest place with a drawbridge on a broad bay, the estuary of the Chocktawhatchee River. Along the way he meets up again with Skink, on the same mission. Combining forces, they determine that T.C. is holding Malley prisoner somewhere up the alligator and wild boar-infested river on a dilapidated rented houseboat, and the unlikely pair of rescuers set out behind them in a "borrowed" canoe.

Then when their beached canoe is washed down river in a flash flood, Skink dives in to catch it and is presumably pulled under by an eight-foot alligator. Horrified, Richard nevertheless resolves to continue on foot up river to free his cousin, where he discovers the houseboat anchored up a tributary creek with his cousin handcuffed to the wheel. Richard realizes that Malley's salvation is up to him alone.

But he reckons without the legendary recuperative powers of Hiaasen's iconic Skink, who survives having his foot run over by a truck while rescuing a baby turtle, a mauling by a giant 'gator, and being shot by T.C. along the way to a timely conclusion for their quest, and in a page-turning and well-deserved denouement, Richard and Malley reunite with him ("It's the Youth of America!" quips Skink) in time to see T. C. meet justice in the jaws of that same grandaddy 'gator. Although set in the familiar format of his young adult and adult eco-thrillers, Hiaasen makes use the motif of the iconic shaman and his fatherless apprentice in a modern morality play, complete with the sage mentor's totem, in this case the believed-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker which appears to Richard and Malley as the symbol of Hiaasen's perpetual theme, the hoped-for survival of Florida's native creatures and environment.

Hiaasen, who won Newbery honors for his first eco-thriller for young readers, Hoot, followed by its noted companion books, Flush, Scat, and Chomp (see my reviews here), sets all of his books in the abused but resilient Florida landscape, with humor and strong male and female characters on a cockeyed but riveting moral quest to right a wrong, personal and ecological. For reluctant readers (which many teens are), Hiaasen's newest work, a 2014 National Book Award nominee,  has it all--recognizable kid characters and the usual Florida suspects (here played by the revoltingly dead-gar-smelling brothers, "Nickel" and "Dime"), sharp wit, and a fast pace through one of the sort of all-out missions of justice that hold young readers fast.

Classic Hiaasen in all its glory! "It's a quintessentially Hiaasen romp for a younger set, combining a message of taking care of the world with suspense, humor, a generous helping of Florida wildlife and much heart," writes the New York Times reviewer.