Amazing Adventures

Adventure stories tend to share common elements such as exotic settings, plot twists, and courageous characters, but each adventure is as unique as the teen and preteen readers who enjoy adventure novels. In this episode, Scott will share a wide range of diverse adventures, taking teen readers from ancient Greece to the streets of Harlem to universes beyond our own.

Featured Title: The White Darkness by Geraldine McCaughrean (HarperTempest, 2005)

Set in the bleak but beautiful Antarctic, The White Darkness is part rollicking adventure story, part teen romance. Winner of the 2008 Printz Award for Young Adult Literature, this captivating novel has surprises and double crosses at every turn and features a narrator with a unique and lively voice and personality.

Encourage teen readers to join Sym as she (accidentally) embarks on a journey to Antarctica, facing the dangers of the wild, an obsessive uncle, and her own fears about herself.

Additional Recommendations

• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle (Farrar Straus Griroux, 1962)
• The Odyssey attributed to Homer, translated by Robert Fagles (Viking, 1996)
• The Adventures of Ulysses adapted by Bernard Evslin (Scholastic, 1980)
• The Odyssey directed by Andrei Konchalovsky (Hallmark, 1997)
• Rite of Passage by Richard Wright (HarperTrophy, 1994)