In the background the two mothers renew their friendship each year, and Lauren, Belly’s mother, provides support for her friend-if not, unfortunately, for the children-in Susannah’s losing battle with breast cancer. Belly’s dawning awareness of her sexuality and that of the boys is a strong theme, as is the sense of summer as a separate and reflective time and place: Readers get glimpses of kisses on the beach, her best friend’s flirtations during one summer’s visit, a first date. Han’s leisurely paced, somewhat somber narrative revisits several beach-house summers in flashback through the eyes of now 15-year-old Isabel, known to all as Belly.īelly measures her growing self by these summers and by her lifelong relationship with the older boys, her brother and her mother’s best friend’s two sons.
Teachers will want to pair this with Mark Pfetzer’s Within Reach: My Everest Story (1998). This and other elements such as the return of the long-lost father, bite-size chunks of information about climbing and altitude, an all-male cast, competition and suspense (can Peak be the youngest ever to summit Everest, and can he beat out a 14-year-old Nepalese boy who accompanies him?) creates the tough stuff of a “boys read.” The narrative offers enough of a bumpy ride to satisfy thrill seekers, while Peak’s softer reflective quality lends depth and some-but not too much-emotional resonance. Peak must learn to navigate the extreme and exotic terrain but negotiate a code of ethics among men.
To save him, his long-lost Everest-trekking dad appears with a plan for the duo to make a life in Katmandu-a smokescreen to make Peak become the youngest person in history to summit Mount Everest. 12-16)ĭare-devil mountain-climber Peak Marcello (14), decides to scale the Woolworth Building and lands in jail. As usual, he keeps the suspense high and the pages turning it’s pure escapist entertainment.
Horowitz continues his always preposterous plots with several unapologetic references to the James Bond oeuvre. Alex must fight the villain as a nuclear bomb ticks off the seconds to doomsday. Finally meeting his major foe, he learns that the man identifies Alex with his dead son and wants to adopt him. He foils an attempt by a ruthless smuggler to kidnap and murder his ersatz father, fights a frenzied great white shark, and barely avoids being crushed to death as a conveyor belt moves him ever closer to the grinding wheels in an old sugar mill. Armed with a few spy gadgets and his own sense of duty, Alex masquerades as the son CIA agents and travels to a small island owned by Cuba. Alex finds himself entangled with a renegade Russian general intent on causing a massive nuclear explosion that would poison most of Western Europe. The third in the continuing adventures of Alex Rider, 14-year-old British spy, provides a rollicking ride for young action fans.
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