adventure

This is Ally Carter's first book in her YA series, "The Gallagher Girls", about a prestigious school for exceptional girls who are becoming spies.  It is told from the perspective of 15 year old Cameron Morgan, a.k.a "the Chameleon", and daughter of the headmistress of the Gallagher school.  Cammie and her best friends, Liz and Bex, can handle anything thrown at them, literally.  They speak multiple languages, can hack high security computers, and can kill an enemy with their bare hands, but when Cammie meets a normal boy in the nearby small town of Roseville the friends are at a loss.  Their

Book 2 of Lynette Eason's series Women of Justice is just as suspensful and hair raising as Book 1 Too Close to Home.  In Don't Look Back we catch up with characters from Book 1 though now the spot light is on Jamie Cash, survivor or a brutal kidnapping at age 18. 

Jamie, who struggled with agoraphobia following her abduction, has finally started coming out of her shell.  She is now working for the local law enforcement as a forensic anthropologist, though she still struggles with fear on a daily basis.  When two skeletons are found with similar injuries Jamie believes that the deaths are

Stolen is written as a letter from Gemma, a sixteen-year-old Londoner, to her kidnapper Ty, who is nine years her senior. Gemma is abducted from the Bangkok airport while waiting for her connecting flight to Vietnam, where she is going on holiday with her parents. At an airport café, she is drugged by a handsome, somehow familiar Ty, and she is “stolen” and taken to wild Australian outback. There, she is forced to live in the middle of Great Sandy Desert in a house that Ty had build for them. Ty, who grew up in Australian outback, believes this is the perfect place for Gemma and him to build

Pratchett’s first book aimed at young adults in his Discworld series, The Wee Free Men is a witty, sardonic adventure.  Tiffany Aching is a 9 year old girl of the Chalk country who with “First Sight and Second Thoughts” wants to be a witch.  When her little brother, Wentworth, is taken by the Queen of the Elves, Tiffany will get the chance to prove she should be a witch in training.  With the help of the Nac Mac Feegle (the Wee Free Men), tiny red haired fairies who like to drink, steal, and fight, Tiffany bravely ventures into the Queens’ land to find her brother and bring him home.  The

A great, true-life adventure story appeals partly because you, the reader, can find yourself thinking something like, "These are real people and they were crazy enough to do this stuff!"

In "Blind Descent," author James M. Tabor tells the tale of two teams of spelunkers who are vying to discover the world's deepest cave. And they're not just recreational spelunkers, either -- they're seasoned explorers with expertise in fields ranging from geology to engineering to cave diving.

The story: A team in Mexico is pushing into Cheve Cave, a beautiful or nightmarish world depending on your

Having read all of Daniel Silva's "Gabriel Allon" books I decided to go back to his earlier works. The Mark of the Assassin is similar to his later stories in that it deals with intelligence agents and rogue/evil/shadowy individuals and organizations. The pacing is fast and the story adventurous and thrilling. I was pleasantly surprised to find several characters who also appear in the "Gabriel Allon" series. Although the main protagonist is different, the world of The Mark of the Assassin is clearly the same one Gabriel inhabits. I look forward to reading "The Marching Season", the sequel to

I saw an article in the New York Times discussing the 40th anniversary of the publication of Deliverance and decided to give it a try. Although reading it was not always a pleasant experience, I’m not sorry about my decision. I first saw the film years ago, so the plot was not new to me. In spite of this, I could not put the book down until I had finished it. The story begins when four Atlanta suburbanites decide to take a canoe trip down a wild river that is slated to be dammed up. The river itself is a mystical presence in the book: Far more so than in the film. A ghastly event occurs that

The Hunger Games has been recommended to me repeatedly by many of my coworkers and library patrons. Since I grew up under a totalitarian regime, I usually try to avoid reading about such regimes, because I have enough personal experience to last me a lifetime. Therefore it took me over a year and half to finally give it a try. After initial hesitancy, I quickly became addicted to the story and could not put the book down.

The story is set in the country of Panem (that covers part of the former USA) in an unspecified time in the future. The Panem is divided into 12 oppressed Districts and is

Carl Hiaasen's children's book, Scat is written in the traditional Hiaasen flavor which blends humor, suspense, action adventure and heroism all thrown together in the Florida swampland. All of us, at one time or another, have encountered scary teachers and found ourselves in unfair situations. Bunny Starch, the biology teacher, struck fear in the hearts of every student until one day on a biology field trip to the Black Vine Swamp, she mysteriously disappeared. Nick and Marta, two of Bunny's students, set out to solve the mystery. Ed Asner narrates this 9 hour and 18 minute CD Audio. Both

This poignant story of a remarkable and complex struggle in one of the darkest corners of Africa brings light to our shaken world. Mark and Delia Owens have developed a revolutionary and enlightened economic system which uplifts the local population and preserves wildlife. Devoted to conservation, the Owens survived threats to their lives and overcome ruthless corruption. Working within unfamiliar cultures, they successfully helped elephants, lions, and other native animals recover and flourish. The lion-hearted Mark and doe-eyed Delia bring hope to us all. For anyone interested in Africa or