Great Reading: Bookmark It!

Volume 30, Number 4, April 2003

Teens in Danger
Grades 6-12

Rosemary Chance

The house of the scorpion. Nancy Farmer.
Richard Jackson/Atheneum, 2002. $17.95. 0-689-85222-3. In this realistic science fiction novel, young Matt Alacron lives in Opium, a tract of land between Mexico and the United States. Once he learns he’s a clone who is being kept alive for the organs he can provide, he runs, leaving the only world he has ever known, only to face yet another cruel existence. Winner of the 2002 National Book Award for young people’s literature.

Lord of the kill. Theodore Taylor.
Blue Sky/Scholastic, 2002. $16.95. 0-439-33725-9. At the Los Coyotes Preserve, 16-year-old Ben Jepson finds the remains of a woman in a steel-fenced compound with two jaguars. Next, Ben’s favorite tiger, a valuable Siberian named Lord of the Kill, is stolen and held for ransom. With his parents absent, Ben wonders whom he can trust.

The thief lord. Cornelia Funke.
Chicken House/Scholastic, 2002. $16.95. 0-439-40437-1. Orphaned brothers Prosper and Bo are on the run in Venice, Italy, when they are accepted into a small gang of street children who have made a home in an abandoned theater.

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Rosemary Chance is assistant professor in the School of Library and Information Science at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg. She can be reached at rchance@student.necc.cc.ms.us.