Books I Have Recommended Prior to 2005

This is by no means a complete list, and I've tried to list books other than those well known by readers already - which is why you won't see the obvious names like Patricia Wrede, Bruce Coville, Robin McKinley, Barbara Hambly, J. K. Rowling, Jane Yolen, L.J. Smith ... I think you catch my drift! So here goes:

• GEOGRAPHY CLUB and THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO by Brent Hartinger.  These are both contemporary teen books. GEOGRAPHY CLUB is about closeted gay kids who form a club with a boring name to hide the fact that it's a club for gays (and what happens when someone who's really interested in geography wants to join, as well as what happens in the couples relationships that are part of the club).  THE LAST CHANCE TEXACO is about teenagers in a last-chance-before-juvenile-prison group home, where not all of the kids are happy about their fate, and other kids come to see that not everyone in the juvenile system is cruel or uncaring.  Both books have endings that are realistic, not happily-ever-afters, with the main characters learning that reality has a lot of variety and that there aren't easy answers for problems.  In GEOGRAPHY CLUB the kids are under immense pressure to stay closeted due to homophobia in the school; in LAST CHANCE TEXACO a great deal of the pressure comes from the outside world and the people who don't want the home, or its troubled kids, around, not to mention the financial worries that are the lot of every group home.  Brent's (yes, I got to meet him at Got Books? in Albany, but I'd read and liked TEXACO weeks before I met this really nice, articulate man) touch with his storytelling is light and moves right along.  He knows how outsiders feel and react, including the times when they react in a way that is contrary to their own best interests.  For those of us who are not gay or wards of the state, these are books that show us how others deal with their situations without preaching or blame.  For those of us who are, these books show you're not alone, and that there are always different ways to handle the problems you face.
• ALT. ED. by Catherine Atkins.  This collection of misfits (high school, this time), forced to attend an after-school session that is not exactly group therapy in order to keep being expelled for bad acts.  It's a "Breakfast Club" kind of group, with the perpetual nasty bad boy Kale (the only less-than-convincing character), Christian Tracee, gay Brendan, "slut" Amber, handsome and essentially good-hearted (if a bit weak) Randy, and fat narrator Susan.  Susan is recovering from her mother's death and trying to deal with her estrangement with her father and brother when she watches Brendan trash tormentor Kale's truck and takes half the blame for it.  Secrets about other members of the group unfold; alliances are made between unlikely friends, and Amber reveals ugly truths about popular boys.  I love unraveling everyone's secrets, seeing Susan rise from the bog of depression from which she begins the book, and seeing the difficult progress some of the group's members make before it's all over.
• THE MISFITS by James Howe, also available in audio form from Full Cast Audio, narrated by Spencer Murphy (Briar in Full Cast's audio books for The Circle of Magic.  By now you must be saying, "What is it with Tammy and groups of misfits?"  Well, I like them, because you can address a number of different school problems at the same time; there's always conflict both between the misfits and with those who declare them to be misfits; and I was one.  I could have used a group of fellow weirdos to help me sort out the weirdness of the world.  In this case, the kids--Skeezy, JoeDan, Addie, and narrator Bobby--who start out protesting the school's two party election system, end up making a very strong point about bullying.  They also re-direct their own lives and have an effect on those around them, even the adults.  Not that these are goody-goody kids.  All of them can be major irritants, which I think is part of the point: you need someone really irritating to shake up your view of the world as it is and as it should be.  Packed into the story are JoeDan's outrageous fashion choices (he's got me wondering if I could get little pictures on one of my nails), Bobby's relationship both with his down-on-his-luck dad and the stiff suit who runs the tie department where Bobby works, Addie's love life, and Skeezy's bad attitude in general.  Whichever version you pick up (I actually recommend both), you'll laugh and you'll catch yourself thinking, too.
• MOUNTAIN SOLO by Jeannette Ingold.  (NOT a misfit book.)  I also got to meet Jeannette Ingold, a very pleasant person, at Got Books? in Albany.  I had already read her book THE GREAT BURN, about the mammoth forest fire that swept across Idaho and Montana in the early 1900s.  We actually had a nice conversation about forest fire prevention and its results, then and now.  MOUNTAIN SOLO still has that love of the mountain forests, but this is a contemporary novel.  After she freezes at her first big concert, Tess returns to Montana, her dad, and his new family to rethink her career as a child and adult violinist, a career mostly built up by her mom.  Hiking through the mountain country with her dad and his family, searching for a homestead for his archaeologist wife, Tess remembers her love of the wilderness and her dad's wild animal rescue efforts, grows to like her stepmother and stepsister, and considers the steps in her life that led her both to follow the career path laid out by her mother and to fall in love with the violin.  She must decide where to go from here: back to New York and the challenges of either being a solo performer or a member of an orchestra, or to stay in Montana, without the access she has to other child prodigies like her and to the cream of music teachers.  Interwoven with her story is that of the homesteading couple whose house they are looking for, a young man who came west with his father's violin, and a young woman who survives an abusive home to make a life with him.  If you like this, then I also recommend Ingold's THE GREAT BURN; PICTURES, 1918, about a girl who finds that a camera can help her to connect with and sort out the events around her as the U.S. enters WWI and the influenza of 1917 races over the world; and THE WINDOW, a supernatural thriller about a newly blinded girl who hears otherworldly voices through her window.
• HAVE SPACE SUIT, WILL TRAVEL by Robert A. Heinlein, also available in audio form from Full Cast Audio, narrated by Will McAuliffe (who plays the hero, Kip).  Listening to Cynthia Bishop, who plays Dedicate Lark in Full Cast's version of The Circle of Magic in SANDRY'S BOOK, I was reminded of another literary character who is known for her warm and kind voice, the Mother Thing in HAVE SPACE SUIT.  I e-mailed Bruce Coville to say, "Wouldn't Cynthia be perfect as the Mother Thing?"  And the next thing I know, I am being blamed for the long and arduous work that Full Cast put into this book.  I wish I could say I'm sorry, except, well, I'm not.  HAVE SPACE SUIT includes one of my favorite girl heroes in all science fiction, the indomitable PeeWee, who sets out to save the universe with Kip, the Mother Thing, a rag dolly named Madame Pompadour, and a wad of gum.  Kip is wandering his meadow in his refurbished space suit, named Oscar, when he gets PeeWee's emergency call.  The next thing he knows, a space ship lands in his meadow, followed by another space ship with bad guys in it, and he is kidnapped along with PeeWee and the Mother Thing by a race of very bad creatures and their human flunkies.  It turns out that Mother Thing, who can make Kip and PeeWee feel happy and safe, is the local cop, and the Bug-Faces (what humans call the bad creatures) are trying to get rid of her before she can call in reinforcements from her galactic organization.  Robert Heinlein wrote a number of books with teenaged heroes, and this is one of my favorites.  Hearing characters I love voiced by people who sound as if they are those characters is better than Bassett's ice cream.  (Most of you will have to take my word for it--Bassett's is the ultimate ice cream.)  Only one author can put a 12-year-old genius with a rag doll, a heroic teenager, a loving but stern alien cop, a Roman centurion with an attitude, and a race of intelligent, predatory, meat-eating aliens together (and only Full Cast can rise to the occasion to find voices for them all, not to mention the green monkey alien).
• MONSTROUS REGIMENT by Terry Pratchett.  Okay, I know I say that by and large I'm not going to comment about famous authors and books because I'm assuming you've already found them if you've gotten this far.  But I have to ask those of you who haven't already read it to give it a serious try.  Pratchett is funny, and his premises start out silly: a girl who's dressing as a boy to join the army walks with a swagger and picks her nose to show she's just one of the guys.  A hidden helper advises Polly to give herself a bulge in a place where guys have bulges with the help of a pair of socks, giving rise to a lot of "getting it in the socks" jokes.  She joins a company recruited by Master Sergeant Jackrum, a very fine company which includes a troll and a vampire, all of them needing that extra pair of socks stuffed into their trousers.  They are off to a war with next to no training because their homeland has been fighting for so long that they're out of men, food, uniforms, weapons, and the time to train fresh soldiers.  In the adventures of Polly's company, we find out that no one is who they claim to be, some of her companions are looking for men--brothers, husbands, fathers--in the troops on the battlefront, and that Terry Pratchett is a very sneaky man.  He makes the reader question the motives of those who send other people out to fight their battles and how they keep warfare going with news stories and speeches about patriotism.  He makes us reconsider why people fight, what they fight for, and whether being female is an extra handicap in battle or not.  While his countries and his religions seem to be comic and little more, he very sneakily makes us question religion, war, politics, patriotism, women's and men's issues, and fanaticism.  Even the cartoon sergeant Jackrum, with his bellowing, treachery, and knowledge of where all the bodies are buried, is not nearly as simple as he seems.
• GIFTED TOUCH, Fingerprints #1, Melinda Metz: Rae is still recovering from her discovery that she is not crazy, and she really can read people's thoughts by touching the places where someone has left his/her prints. She is no longer Ms. Popular at her private school, but Ms. Weird-who-went-mental-last-year; she's in group therapy with a bunch of kids who are very strange; she's lost her old friends and is trying to make new ones, oh, yes, and someone is trying to kill her. With the help of her new friends, can she get her life on track? I've read the first two books in this series and have ordered the next three. They move along; Rae is no victim, just someone trying to sort out a really knotted life; and the secondary kid characters are fascinating. So far I've read Fingerprints 2, 3, and 4, and liked them. Metz is also the author of the Roswell series.
• NOBODY LOVES A CENTURION, S.P.Q.R. VI, John Maddox Roberts: Tim and I have been fans of the S.P.Q.R. books since they first came out. Decius Metellus, the son of a proud Roman family in the days when the Roman Republic is coming apart and Julius Caesar is on the rise, is a smart, funny, clever detective. He likes the low life and has an unfortunate tendency to poke into things, a hobby which his family is ashamed of, unless they need his help on something. The secondary characters are strong; the mysteries are well-thought-out, and Decius trying to rough it with the Roman Legions in Germania is a hoot. (He tells us there are two ways to get splendid muscles in the Legions--you either exorcise a lot or you have the armorer build them into your breastplate. Guess which Decius chooses?) In this one Decius has to solve the murder of a much-hated centurion, or the squad that had guard duty that night, men he knows, will be executed.
• FORGOTTEN FIRE, Adam Bagdasarian: a spoiled Armenian boy of a well-to-do family discovers the worst and the best of humanity when Turkey sets out to commit genocide against millions of Armenians during World War I. Vahan struggles to survive and to find a way to live as family member after family member is killed, dies, or vanishes. It's sad; it's moving, and it's about just how much the human spirit can take.
• GODDESS OF YESTERDAY by Caroline Cooney: Anaxandra, the daughter of the rulers of a very small Greek island near the time of the Trojan War, is taken as a hostage to the island of Siphnos. When it's raided by pirates and everyone but Anaxandra is killed, she takes on the identity of the dead princess and heiress of Siphnos, Callisto, and begins a long journey that will bring her to the home of Helen of Troy, and from there to Troy itself. I gulped this down in a day. I love anything with Greek mythology anyway, and Cooney's take on Helen herself is both new and brilliant.
• THE CHILDREN OF HENRY VIII by Alison Weir: normally I find Weir a bit dry, but this is a vivid, lively picture of the children who became the successors of Henry VIII, including the doomed Edward VI, brilliant Jane Grey, the hounded princess who became Bloody Mary Tudor, and the Lady Elizabeth, eventually to become Elizabeth I. This is one of my favorite periods of history, and Weir gives a lot of insight about the religious struggles, the education, and the home lives of these kids, who were very different even while they had much in common.
• VIRGIN by Robin Maxwell: here's a novel about the young Elizabeth Tudor, from the time her father, Henry VIII dies, to the rise of Jane Grey. It's about a period in her life which doesn't often get covered, her life in the house of Catherine Parr Seymour, and Elizabeth's near-death experience, thanks to the monkeyshines of rash, reckless, handsome Tom Seymour.
• ALIEN SECRETS by Annette Curtis Klause (Bantam Doubleday Dell): Puck has been expelled from her Earth school, sent home in disgrace to her parents. On the trip home she meets the alien Hush, a former slave who was robbed of his people's greatest treasure. Puck decides to help her new friend to recover what's his while dealing with ghosts, interplanetary smugglers, murderers and hyperspace travel. Puck's a good-hearted, smart girl with a talent for making friends, plenty of curiosity, and lots of courage. Klause has also written THE SILVER KISS, a vampire love story, and BLOOD AND CHOCOLATE, about werewolves--both are for older teenagers, I think, while readers 10 and up should like ALIEN SECRETS.
• THE WINDS OF MARS by H. M. Hoover (Dutton Books): When Mars is in trouble and its leaders abandon their people, it's up to the president's daughter Annalyn to help Mars' population recover and build again. DELIKON, about Earth under the control of invaders who strictly control the lives of its people, is also good science fiction by this writer, but it's harder to find. Readers 10-14 for WINDS, readers 12 and up for DELIKON, which is a bit harder to get into. (DELIKON is also out of print, but you may find it in your library.)
• SIRENA by Donna Jo Napoli (Scholastic Press): the story of a Grecian siren who wants to find a man to love without killing him in the process. It's sad and sweet, a tale of an unusual creature who struggles to make a life different from others of her kind. Readers 12 and up.
• COURT DUEL and CROWN DUEL by Sherwood Smith (Harcourt Brace): Meliara is the daughter of a poverty-stricken noble family in rebellion against their king, who is bleeding his people of all they own. She and her brother learn the ways of armies and courts, coming into conflict with their ruler and a nobleman who may or may not be their enemy. Smith's magic is unusual, the nobleman even more fascinating than my Duke Roger. There's plenty of swordplay and frantic night rides, desperate fear and triumph. Readers 12 and up.
• SNAKE DREAMER by Priscilla Galloway (Delacorte Press): This book seems modern enough--Dusa has a sleep disorder, a never-ending series of nightmares about her hair turning into clusters of snakes. Enter Yali and Teno, psychologist experts in snake dreaming, who offer Dusa time in their Mediterranean clinic and possibly a cure. But are they modern? And are Dusa's dreams signs of a modern-day sleep disorder, or the return of a monster from ancient Greece? Readers 12 and up.
• THE THINGS WITH WINGS by Gregory J. Holch (Scholastic): Newton is fascinated by the Emerald Rainbow butterflies that come to his town in the spring, and so is that strange and adveturous girl, Vanessa. Why is such a beautiful thing kept secret, and why do kids disappear when the butterflies come? A wild and fun book set in our modern world! Readers 10 and up.
• HOBKIN and SWITCHING WELL by Peni R. Griffin (HOBKIN, published by McIlderry Books, is out of print now, but it may still be in your library; SWITCHING WELL is published in McIlderry hardcover, Penguin Puffin paperback). Both are set in modern day Texas. In HOBKIN runaway sisters discover a new home with a displaced English sprite in charge, one who insists that they do their share of the housework. I don't know if y'all share my dislike for books about cute little people, but this isn't one of those books. The little people in this book are as dangerous as they are magical, and worthy of respect. SWITCHING WELL depicts the adventures of two Texas girls, one in the 1890s, one in the 1990s, who think a different time has to be better than their own. Wishing in a well on the same day, one asks to be sent ahead a hundred years, the other to be sent back for the same length of time--and the malicious spirit of the well gives them what they've asked for. Remind me never to go to Texas--their elementals are not the kind of people I would ever want to mess with.
• THE OTHER ONES by Jean Thesman, Viking hardcover, edited by my friend Sharyn November. I loved this book. The girl hero has magic in her blood and doesn't want it, a familiar spirit who nags her to accept her heritage, a new oddball friend whose behavior doesn't make sense, and two very confusing male friends. I love the way this book is written. It has the same beautiful quality I associate with Barbara Cohen's UNICORNS IN THE RAIN, an awareness of the natural world, and a girl hero whose problem is very familiar to me--she just wants to be normal. As with Peni Griffin and Nina Kiriki Hoffman, magic in this book isn't at all safe. I need to find some of this woman's other books!
• BACK YARD DRAGON by Betsy and Samuel Stern, HarperCollins hardcover. A boy has a dragon appear in his back yard. What do you do with such a thing in our modern world? And how can you (A) feed such a critter and (B) send him to his proper home, in the distant past? Who can you tell, and who will help? Owen is the kind of boy I ran with when I was a kid, fun, imaginative and good-hearted. For younger readers, but it's fun even for adults.
• The Magic Elements quartet by Mallory Loehr (WATER WISHES EARTH MAGIC, WIND SPELL, [FIRE DREAMS to be published in May 2001], Random House Stepping Stone paperbacks. This is definitely for younger readers, though once again, adult me really enjoyed it. It's my favorite kind of fantasy, in which three normal kids of our time are caught up with magical events and the Greek Gods, all the time while trying to deal with the everyday struggle of being brothers and sisters. At first the magic they find seems wonderful, but, as is the way with seemingly free magic, nothing is as simple as it looks. I might not have picked these books up if Mallory wasn't my the editor, and I would have missed a fun read if I hadn't. If you have a kid, niece, or younger sibling you want to ease into fantasy, this quartet is a good place to start.
• MERLIN'S KIN by Josepha Sherman, published in hardcover by August House. Jo has collected stories of great mages from all over the world, introducing us to the likes of Chitoku from Japan, Mbokothe from the Kenyan Akamba tribe, Volka of Russia, and no less a great mage than King Solomon himself. If you want to see what Merlin's competitors got up to, this is the book!
• OBERNEWTWYN by Isobelle Carmody, a Tor Books hardcover (the sequel, THE FARSEEKERS, was published in 2000). Carmody is well known in Australia, and I'm glad she's now being published here. In this book, the world is struggling back after a radiation catastrophe called The Great White. People are being born with new mental abilities due to their exposure to radiation, but society fears and kills them where they are found. Elspeth only wants to live normally; she fights to hide her growing powers (like hearing the mind-voices of animals), but she is marked as different, and sent to the strange mountain fortress called Obernewtwyn. There she must decide who to trust, and what to do when her life and freedom are in danger. Could it be she and her friends have the power to change their world for the better?
• SECOND STAR by Dana Stabenow, Ace paperback; out of print now, but worth reading if you find it. Star Svensdotter is the commander of a soon-to-be-finished space colony near the moon, dealing with all kinds of disasters in the shape of anti-colony terrorists, politicians, and a plan to take the colony away from the control of those who will live there. Then a message from a brand new race arrives to make things really interesting. This is a bit mature for younger readers, but for the first time I felt like I was reading the kind of book Heinlein might have written with modern technology and a female hero. I'm digging around the Internet for this author's other books--it seems she's stopped writing science fiction and is now a very successful mystery author.
• YANKED! by Nancy Kress, TIGER IN THE SKY by Sheila Finch, A GAME OF WORLDS by Roger McBride Allen: the Out of Time trilogy you might also file under the name of David Brin, who is managing the series. The premise: the people of the future have run into problems with new, alien cultures. They've managed to erase conflict from their own society, and their encounters with these aliens lead them to think they need people who can deal with conflict to solve some of the problems that come up. Their solution is to grab kids from past times and bring them forward, because only kids can survive the new, strange alien teleportation technology. In each book there are kids from the 1990s and the past. Not only are these books real science fiction, but they're an introduction to three writers who have plenty more out there if you like what you see here.
• The Crown of Stars series by Kate Elliott, DAW hardcover and paperback: KING'S DRAGON, PRINCE OF DOGS, THE BURNING STONE. This continent is a mess, with civil war and an invasion by the war-like, non-human Eika tearing up the countryside, and more foes and traitors waiting for their chance to attack. In Wendar power, learning, and property are controlled by women; men are warriors and builders, and inheritance is passed first from mother to daughter, then mother to son. You can see a push for men to gain the upper hand coming in the society, and other countries are as male-dominated as our world, but in Wendar the old ways hold, for now. Magic is hidden, viewed by the Church as evil unless it's controlled by them, and with magic in use everywhere, it's hard to see a more foolish policy. The characters are fascinating, from Fifth Son of the Eika, reared to be savage and using his brains to rise in power among his people, Sanglant, the bastard prince and warrior who is a great hero, Hanna, the king's messenger, Alan, the master of dogs, and Sapienta, the cool and intelligent princess. I confess, the main female hero, Liath, I sometimes find a little too crushed and trembling, having suffered much pain in her life, but she shoots a mean bow, and she seems to gain courage when she's around Sanglant. Also, there are so many interesting greater and lesser characters I like completely that I can exist with Liath.
• The Liveship Traders by Robin Hobb, Bantam Spectra hardcover, Bantam paperback: SHIP OF MAGIC, MAD SHIP, SHIP OF DESTINY. Here is a world with intelligent, man-eating sea serpents, pirate kings, ship captains, and the very rare vessels called "liveships." Liveships are just that, alive, thinking beings who absorb the thoughts and feelings of those who live aboard them. They are owned and sailed by old families who never let them get out of their hands, and who spend their lives, and the lives of their children and grandchildren, paying the mysterious Rain Wild Traders back for the wood which makes a ship that can come to life. Again, there is a big cast here--a female sailor who only wants to captain her family's ship, her self-centered niece, the disgraced son of another prominent family who is floundering after a life he can take pride in, a pirate captain who is well on his way to becoming a king, an odd Rain Wild youth who can hear the voices in the walls of buried cities, even the sea serpents, last children of a dying race. I liked Hobb when she wrote as Megan Lindholm. She has incredible ideas and fascinating characters, including the newly wakened liveship Vivacia and the insane liveship Paragon, who has already killed one of his crews. SHIP OF DESTINY wraps up the tale for those who won't buy till the story's told.
• A Song of Fire and Ice by George R. R. Martin, published in hardcover by Bantam Doubleday Dell and in paperback by Bantam: A GAME OF THRONES, A CLASH OF KINGS, A STORM OF SWORDS (since added - A FEAST FOR CROWS and A DANCE WITH DRAGONS). Again, a large and varied cast, a scope that takes in whole countries, and peril on all hands. There are echoes of the Wars of the Roses here, with a powerful, scheming family whose daughter married the king, and of the Mongol hordes. It's hard to say what's going to destroy the Seven Kingdoms first--the internal struggles for power that lead in the second book to a civil war, the return of the daughter of the overthrown king with a fleet and her young dragons, or the growing menace of unknown powers in the far north, beyond the giant wall that has kept them all safe for generations. We see much of what goes on through the eyes of members of the Stark family, the northern wardens whose job it is to fight off whatever menaces might arrive from beyond the wall. I like their youngest son, Bran, who has a lot of courage and needs it, his older sister Arya, a fiery would-be sword fighter, and their illegitimate half-brother Jon, whose job it is to mount guard in the north. Also fascinating are Tyrion Lannister, the dwarf brother of the beautiful, ambitious queen, a man too intelligent for his own good, and Daenerys, the exile, trying to find her way among hostile peoples with an eye to reclaiming the throne from which her family was ousted only a generation ago. Like the Liveship and Crown books, these are doorstop sized, but if you like sprawling fantasy, you will love this saga. And, as they used to say in Byzantium, "If you can't take the intrigue, get out of the cabal"!
• Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts by Josepha Sherman and T.K.F. Weisskopf, published in trade (large sized) paperback by August House. When I was a junior in college, one of my housemates was a folklorist, who taught me that there are people who make a living reading and writing about the many different variations of one basic song, or who collect the songs, stories, even jumprope chants of kids as a way to show why we think the way we do and what stays in our culture's background. Now I find this amazing collection, written by my bud Jo Sherman (SON OF DARKNESS was her most recent stand- alone book about dark elves loose in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Star Trek fans know her as the co-writer of VULCAN'S FORGE and VULCAN'S HEART with Susan Shwartz, Buffy fans know her as the co-author of the book VISITORS with Laura Ann Gilman, Xena fans know her as the co-author of EVERYTHING I WANTED TO KNOW I LEARNED FROM THE WARRIOR PRINCESS BY GABRIELLE, as told to Josepha Sherman--our Jo is a girl of many, many parts) and Ms. Weisskopf, containing many, many new verses to old standbys like the title song, "Nobody loves me, everybody hates me," "Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Burning of the School", and even well-loved commercial jingles from Times Gone By. I recommend this book for people of any age--anyone can find something to grin over here, and it is really interesting to see the changes different people in different places make to our favorite rhymes and jingles. The only thing that's more fun is seeing Jo in the kids' area at a convention, wheedling still more variations out of her audience.
• RED-TAILS IN LOVE by Marie Winn, paperback and hardcover from Pantheon. You could say this is a book about a red-tailed hawk (male) on his grand quest to find a mate worthy of his affections and raise young hawks with her. You could also say this is about the clash between wild animals and city people, or the affection some city people have for their wildlife. I say this is a book about Manhattan, which is where I live--its people, its birds, its buildings, its laws, and Central Park. There are madball birdlovers here, none so madball as the Central Park bird watchers, who follow Pale Male's exploits as he loves, and loses, and loves again. They intercede for this hawk with building superintendents, City Hall officialdom, and even celebrities, who turn out to have hearts after all. A wonderful book about a side of Manhattan that only Manhattanites usually see.
• MOONFALL by Jack McDevitt (HarperPrism): there's a comet headed straight for the moon, just when a moon base complex has been completed and a manned space flight is about to leave for Mars. What will happen, here and in space, when the comet hits? Will the moon survive? Will we survive? A real nail-biter! Written for adults, but I think any bookhound who is reading adult books will like this.
• THE DEATH OF THE NECROMANCER by Martha Wells (Avon Eos): Set in a fantasy world that seems like a combination of Victorian London and Paris, this is the tale of a criminal mastermind and his crew who run afoul of the only kind of magical practice that is completely forbidden: necromancy. It's about mass murder, unusual alliances and utter fear, all a part of the poorest slums and most elegant houses. Written for adults, may be a little violent for younger readers. Wells has just published a new one, THE WHEEL OF THE INFINITE, which takes place in a setting much like India, with a cranky older mage and her determined, handsome, self-appointed bodyguard.
• THE WHEEL OF THE INFINITE by Martha Wells, Avon Eos hardcover: an exiled priestess/mage returns to her home temple just as her home is preparing to renew the huge mandala-like creation that reweaves the fabric of the universe itself. Any complications in the elaborate ceremony can result in the destruction of the world, and dark forces are trying to cause just that. Maskelle, once the Voice of the Adversary, one of the most powerful of the god-like Ancestors, is returning to her temple to discover what is going wrong-- why so many dark happenings and abominations are cropping up at this most delicate time. With her is determined swordsman Rian, an exile himself, who has decided she needs looking after and won't take "Go away" as an order. Martha Wells always has incredible images in her books, and I really like Maskelle, a mature, tart, intelligent woman who has learned the hard way that power of all kinds has to be handled with care. She also gets to answer the trickiest question of all: what if you can't trust the god you were born and bred to serve?
• THE TARANTULA IN MY PURSE AND 172 OTHER WILD PETS, Jean Craighead George (Harper Collins): George, the creator of JULIE OF THE WOLVES and other books about teenagers and nature, did a nonfiction turn about all the animals she and her children raised in the years her kids lived at home: crows, wood ducks, frogs, mice. . . . Not only is this a hysterically funny book with the mishaps and mischief that result when two species can't just tell each other what they want, but it's a useful one. I wish I'd had this book when I had a baby crow in my bathroom for a week!
• The Mediator series by Jenny Carroll (SHADOWLAND, NINTH KEY, REUNION, DARKEST HOUR), Pocket Books paperback for teen readers: Susannah is an average New York teenager with a keen and edgy fashion sense, the problems of her mother's remarriage to a Californian with three sons, trying to figure out how to get on in a small Catholic high school near Monterey, California, keep up her grades, and try to make friends. Well, those are the average problems. She has a couple of extra ones: a dad who's never around when she needs him, because he's dead, but who does show up to check out how she and her mother are doing, a very hunky male ghost who resides in her bedroom and has done so for over a century, and an unfortunate ability to see, hear, and make contact with the dead. In the course of sending troublesome ghosts on to the next level, whatever it may be, she's racked up a really interesting school file, not to mention all those police escorts home in Brooklyn, and she's started out at her new school by rendering her new locker unopenable (she smacked it with the really vicious ghost of the former owner, who wants revenge on her ex-boyfriend and maybe even on the whole school). And that's just in the first book. Susannah is definitely not a sit- around-to-be-rescued girl, and she's been doing this for so long that she isn't particularly eager to take help when it's offered. And she fits all this in around her day job: integrating with her stepbrothers and stepdad, making friends at school (for the first time she actually has friends, and pretty cool ones at that), and running for class vice president. I like these books. I like this author. Buy lots of her books and force your friends to read them.
• 1-800-WHERE-R-U series by Jenny Carroll (CODE NAME CASSANDRA, SAFE HOUSE), Pocket Books paperback, for teen readers: Jessica has a few problems with anger management (as does Susannah), but she's learning to deal when she's struck by lightning. It doesn't seem to have any effect, until after a bowl of cereal and a night's sleep, she realizes she knows where the kid whose face is on the milk carton is living now--so she calls it in, as well as several other kids' locations. She's right. She's also opened a whole can of worms as the government and the press descend on her home with plans for her future and she discovers that one kid didn't want to be found--his mother took him from his abusive father. Jessica doesn't decide to sit around and hope things will work out differently, though. She's going to try to make things right, with her family (her older brother, coping with mental illness, as a bad episode as a result of the press assault), with her friends, and with the kid who didn't want to be found. Any girl who knows truly superior brands of motorcycle is okay by me, and she doesn't settle for being manipulated by the school, the press, and the government. For you romance fans, this author has also written novel, THE PRINCESS DIARIES, PRINCESS IN THE SPOTLIGHT, and PRINCESS IN LOVE under the name Meg Cabot. There are no supernatural powers, but they're still just as much fun as her other books, so don't let the girl jackets and the tiaras scare you away!
• THE GIRL WITH SILVER EYES by Willo Davis Roberts, Scholastic Apple paperback, for intermediate readers: I read this one when it first came out in the 80s, because I am a sucker for psychic books, and had a recent hankering to read it again. I like it still, and not just because Katie can move things with her mind. While most of the adults around her are treating her like a pariah or accusing her of witchcraft, Katie has the smarts to see there may be a connection between her and the other women her mom used to work with who all got pregnant and had kids at about the same time Katie was born. All of them were packaging an experimental new drug that disappeared from the market . . . So Katie sets out to discover if those other kids are around and if they have unusual talents, at the same time that she's rebuilding her relationship with her mother (they lived apart for years) and making friends with people who don't have any other unusual talents than open minds and a willingness to make friends with Katie. Katie is a cool kid with a highly developed sense of what's right and what's wrong, and the smarts to see through adult flimflam.
• WELCOME TO THE ARK BY Stephanie S. Tolan, Harper Tempest paperback, teen readers: in the near future, when it looks as if violence will tear the world to pieces, four very unusual kids--two teenagers, two younger kids--are committed to the Laurel Mountain Center for Research and Rehabilitation--a mental institution. All four are thought to be seriously disturbed, but the things that disturb them aren't the things that disturb the other patients. Taryn can feel the land. Miranda is a child genius who speaks a wild number of languages and is tired of being exhibited by her parents. Doug is plain sick of the knife-and-gun macho of his father and brothers, while Elijah, who seems autistic, is wide open to the tides of violence throughout the world. All four are taken into a separate house called the Ark, run by two unusual psychologists, who may be able to help these four to a sense of humanity, connection, and empowerment, if the world doesn't go crazy, and if the program isn't shut down. Very thought-provoking--I need to see what else this writer has written, including a 25-years-later sequel.
• THE LAST BOOK IN THE UNIVERSE by Rodman Philbrick, Blue Sky Press (Scholastic) hardcover, intermediate and teen readers: the near future is an ugly place, where most of the world lives in burnt-out cityscapes drinking bad water, zones out on virtual reality brain jacks so they can dream their lives away, and people trade to survive and live under the rule of the gangs. Everyone knows there is a better place with good air and water, where things grow, and where those who have been genetically modified to be superior in every way live a happy existence. Spaz lives in the urban wasteland, unable to escape reality through brain probes because they trigger epilectic seizures. He doesn't realize he's lucky he can't use the mental vacations of the probes, which are every bit as addictive as our modern drugs; he's just happy he's got a job scavenging for one of the gangs. The problem is that his younger sister is dying, and it may be that the "proovs," the genetically improved, can save her. With the help of the nutball Ryter, who talks about things like writing and books, Little Face, a feral kid, and an unusual proov named Lanaya, maybe Spaz can help his sister and his world. All he has to do is survive the trip to the homelands of the proovs, and the proovs themselves.

Other favorites: LETTERS FROM THE EARTH by Mark Twain; DISPATCHES (the Vietnam War) by Michael Herr; the political thrillers of Ross Thomas (including THE FOOLS IN TOWN ARE ON OUR SIDE and THE SEERSUCKER WHIPSAW); the books of Stephen King (I particularly love IT and FIRESTARTER).

Historical novels I always recommend for kids 10 and up: CATHERINE, CALLED BIRDY (and others) by Karen Cushman; THE RAMSAY SCALLOP by Frances Temple; MARA, DAUGHTER OF THE NILE (and others) by Eloise McGraw; CADDIE WOODLAWN by Carol Ryrie Brink; JOHNNY TREMAINE by Esther Forbes; THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND by Elizabeth George Speare; TOM SAWYER by Mark Twain--all historical fiction titles I re-read at least once a year.

Science fiction and fantasy I always recommend for kids ages 10 and up: BLACK & BLUE MAGIC by Zilpha Keatly Snyder (fantasy); HALF MAGIC by Edgar Eager (fantasy); THE GODS IN WINTER by Patricia Miles (fantasy); EVA (science fiction) and THE LION TAMER'S DAUGHTER (fantasy) by Peter Dickinson; THE THIEF, THE KING OF ATTOLIA and THE KING OF ATTOLIA (all fantasy) by Megan (not "Margaret" as originally appeared on this page - sorry!) Whelan Turner; DRAGON'S MILK (and others) by Susan Fletcher (fantasy); BETWEEN PLANETS, STAR BEAST, RED PLANET (and others) by Robert Heinlein, science fiction (alert: he wrote these in the fifties, so his attitudes toward females are dated, but he really does write a ripping good story!); UNICORNS IN THE RAIN by Barbara Cohen (fantasy).

Science fiction and fantasy written for adults: THE WARRIOR'S APPRENTICE and other books, particularly about the adventures of Miles Vorkosigan, by Lois McMaster Bujold (science fiction); NIGHT CALLS and KINDRED RITES by Katherine Eliska Kimbriel (fantasy set in colonial America); SHEEPFARMER'S DAUGHTER (and others) by Elizabeth Moon (fantasy and science fiction, both with female heroes); THE PSALMS OF HEROD (and others) by Esther Friesner (Friesner is best known for humorous fantasy, but I also like PSALMS and its sequel THE SWORD OF MARY, set in a future where ecology and society collapsed and women who can bear children are the richest possession of all); DOOMSDAY BOOK by Connie Willis (a time travel book that deals with the Black Death); SHARDS OF STARLIGHT and CROSS AND CRESCENT by Susan Shwartz (fantasy set in Byzantium, when an extraordinary family is caught up in war and intrigue).

Historical fiction for older readers: DAUGHTER OF ISIS (and many others set in classical and Byzantine times) by Judith Tarr; A RABBLE IN ARMS (and other historical novels set in colonial America) by Kenneth Roberts; LORD VANITY by Samuel Shellabarger (set in Europe and America in the 1700s); THE THREE MUSKETEERS by Alexander Dumas (set in the time of Louis XIII of France); TRAVELLER by Richard Adams (set in the American Civil War); THE DISORDERLY KNIGHTS (and others set in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, Russia and Scotland in the 1500s) by Dorothy Dunnett; A FREE MAN OF COLOR, FEVER SEASON, and SOLD DOWN THE RIVER by Barbara Hambly (set in New Orleans in the 1830s); ANGELIQUE by Anne Golon (historical romance about an extraordinary woman in the time of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France).