Adventure

Airman

Conor Broekhart was born to fly. In fact, legend has it that he was born flying, in a hot air balloon at the Paris World’s Fair.In the 1890s Conor and his family live on the sovereign Saltee Islands, off the Irish coast. Conor spends his days studying the science of flight with his tutor and exploring the castle with the king’s daughter, Princess Isabella. But the boy’s idyllic life changes forever the day he discovers a deadly conspiracy against the king. When Conor tries to intervene, he is branded a traitor and thrown into jail on the prison island of Little Saltee. There, he has to fight for his life, as he and the other prisoners are forced to mine for diamonds in inhumane conditions. There is only one way to escape Little Saltee, and that is to fly. So Conor passes the solitary months by scratching drawings of flying machines on the prison walls. The months turn into years; but eventually the day comes when Conor must find the courage to trust his revolutionary designs and take to the skies.

A Completely Different Place

When Johnny Nesbit wakes up in a pink bedroom that is inside a glass bottle, he soon realizes that he is battling the Strangers, the fairies that had stolen his baby sister a year earlier. Johnny returns to the Stranger country with his former classmate, Cheryl to try to save a group of kidnapped children from the nasty fairies.

This book is a sequel to The Same Place but Different.

The Book of Time

A statue; a coin; an old book. They look as dusty as everything else in the Faulkner Antiquarian Bookstore, where 14-year-old Sam Faulkner seeks his father, who’s been missing for days. But when Sam slips the coin into the statue, he’s swept back in time — to Scotland in 800 A.D. — where he must find both the statue and another coin in order to return to the present. It’s the first step in an adventure that will take him to ancient Egypt, World War I, even Dracula’s castle and a mystery that will end only when Sam saves his father, or loses him in time.

Ring of the Slave Prince

Tom O’Connor, a poor, adventurous boy lives with his mother and half sister at a tavern on the island of Nevis in 1639. He rescues a slave from drowning, learns he is prince, loses him, travels the Southern Hemisphere in search of him, and finally brings him home to Cape Verde, hoping for a grand reward. But by the time Tom discovers that the prince is really a fisherman’s son, the loss of reward doesn’t matter-his adventures have brought him no use for greed, and as he says, “a reckless regard for other people’s life and well-being.”

Traction Man Is Here!

Traction Man—wearing combat boots, battle pants, and his warfare shirt—comes in a box, but quickly finds the way into the imagination of his lucky new owner. This superhero searches for the Lost Wreck of the Sieve as the boy makes a game of doing the dishes, and later in the bathtub, he conquers the Mysterious Toes that are stealing his pet, the brave little Scrubbing Brush. Traction Man is ready for anything — until he meets up with his boy’s granny and the humiliating outfit she has knit for him.

Take a closer look at Traction Man Is Here! as examined in WOW Review.

Awards
Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards

Brave Story

Young Wataru Mitani’s life is a mess. His father has abandoned him and his mother has been hospitalized after a suicide attempt. Desperately he searches for some way to change his life—a way to alter his fate. To achieve his goal, he must navigate the magical world of Vision, a land filled with creatures both fierce and friendly. And to complicate matters, he must outwit a merciless rival from the real world. Wataru’s ultimate destination is the Tower of Destiny where a goddess of fate awaits. Only when he has finished his journey and collected five elusive gemstones will he possess the Demon’s Bane—the key that will unlock his future.   Charity, bravery, faith, grace and the power of darkness and light: these are the provinces of each gemstone. Brought together, they have the immeasurable power to bring Wataru’s family back together again.

Snake and Lizard

Snake is elegant, calm and a little self-centered, while Lizard is exuberant and irrepressible. Through a series of small (and not so small) adventures, the two friends bicker, compete with each other, go into business and finally, end up as lifelong friends.

Darkside (Book 1) (Darkside)

Jonathan Starling’s home has been attacked, his dad is in an asylum, he’s running for his life, and there’s nowhere to hide. Jonathan has stumbled upon London’s greatest secret: Darkside. Incredibly dangerous and unimaginably exciting, Darkside is the creepiest place Jonathan has ever seen. It’s a world of nightmares and secrets, where fear and evil rule, and Jonathan has to find a way out…. Since Tom Becker learned to hold a pen, he wanted to become a writer. In fact, when he was five years old, he wrote in a notebook that it was his dream was to be an author. Tom studied History at Oxford University and was inspired by the otherworldly atmosphere of this academic institution. He used to spend long days studying and reading in the University library, but now he spends long days writing.