Norah Piehl

Ed Collier (Collie for short) is on a mission. The year is 1934, and a series of tragedies has pushed Ed's family to the brink. First his father died in a lumber accident; then his mother lost her job in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash; finally, Collie's older brother, Little Bill, turned to drink and violence before leaving home and devastating their mother. The family's breaking like a shattered plate, his mother despairs.

Determined to mend the broken pieces, Collie, like so many other young men and boys during the Depression, hits the rails to try to find his older brother and bring him back home to Wisconsin. At first, Collie jumps freight trains under the tutelage of a veteran train jumper known as Scarecrow. Although Scarecrow teaches Collie the best techniques for hopping a boxcar and shows him the ropes at the hobo camps (or jungles ), he also reveals himself to be a racist when a young black boy, Ike, winds up in their car. Following their detention at a Christian mission, Collie develops a friendship with Ike, and the two remain loyal friends and fellow travelers as they ride across the country. The two have their share of missteps, and always barely stay one step ahead of the law, but they share unforgettable adventures that, as one kindly character tells the boys, they'll be able to tell their grandchildren about one day.

The Train Jumper has the flavor of old-time family stories passed down from one generation to another. In an author's note, Don Brown credits the most precious of gems, those who lived history with inspiring many of the anecdotes in its pages. The novel is full of authentic historical color, from mulligan stew and dust storms to tent revivals, minstrel shows and racial slurs. Thanks to these period details, Collie's larger-than-life adventures feel convincingly grounded in Depression-era realities. What's more, with its fast-paced narrative, adventure-laden scenes and suspenseful plot, The Train Jumper will move even reluctant readers along at a speed as breathlessly exhilarating as an express locomotive.

Norah Piehl is a writer and editor in the Boston area.

Fifteen-year-old Kendra Bishop is sick and tired. She’s sick of her parents, high-powered Manhattan bankers and exercise junkies who always have time to run another marathon but can’t spare a second to give Kendra a hug. She’s tired of living according to the rules her parents keep in a binder and expect her to follow without question. So when Kendra sees an ad for the reality show The Black Sheep, in which teenagers from wildly different environments switch families, she writes a heartfelt letter of application. When Kendra is actually picked for the show, she has second thoughts about spending time in California, with the crunchy-granola Mulligans, a free-wheeling family with a full house, few rules and a kleptomaniac ferret. She’s especially put off by Judy, the show’s producer, who’s so determined to create a good story that she has entirely lost sight of, well, reality. After a few days with the Mulligans, though (and especially with their hot teenage son Mitch), Kendra’s determined to see her Black Sheep experience as an opportunity: A Black Sheep tosses out her parents’ rule book and invents her own. The sassy, sharp-tongued narrator of The Black Sheep will appeal to teen readers. Kendra’s transformation into a passionate, independent thinker reminds us of the ways in which all young people eventually define themselves as individuals even if it means being the black sheep of the family for a while.

Tamar’s grandfather helped her survive algebra, taught her how to solve crosswords and enabled her to cope with her father’s sudden disappearance. That’s why Tamar, who was named after her grandfather’s Dutch Resistance alias, is utterly shattered when, devastated by his wife’s growing dementia, her granddad commits suicide. It takes Tamar months to open the box he left her in lieu of a suicide note, but when she does, its cryptic messages send her on an odyssey into her family’s history.

The box’s contents point to her grandfather’s experiences 50 years before, during the harrowing Hunger Winter of 1944, when the Nazis, sensing their imminent defeat, resorted to their most brutal tactics of the Dutch occupation.

Following months of intense espionage training, two young men parachute into the Dutch countryside. One of them, code name Dart, is a first-time wireless operator posing as a doctor. The other, code name Tamar, is a more experienced resistance operative, eager to return to the Netherlands not only to coordinate the local movement but also to revisit his beloved Marijke.

Beautiful and brave Marijke’s bold spirit is more captivating than she knows, igniting a chain of events that erupts in tragedy and leaves indelible scars that last to the present day.

Mal Peet’s young adult novel, which won Britain’s prestigious Carnegie Medal, is a masterpiece of war writing. Using a relentlessly intense narrative, Peet manages to capture the atrocities of the Nazi occupation in a way no history textbook ever could. In addition, Peet vividly conveys the more mundane but no less real realities of wartime: the delights of a bite of chocolate or a sip of cognac, the unexpected boredom, the fragility of love, the unending fear, the hesitation to hope. Just as Tamar’s characters live on long after the final pages, the novel reminds readers that history’s implications cannot and should not ever be forgotten.

Norah Piehl is a writer and editor in the Boston area.

2008 Printz Award Winner

Fourteen-year-old Symone (Sym) knows just about everything there is to know about the coldest, bleakest place on earth: Antarctica. Socially awkward, suffering from a hearing impairment, painfully shy, Sym finds solace in an imaginary companion, legendary polar explorer Titus Oates, who died in an ill-fated 1911 expedition to the South Pole. Absorbed by books about Antarctica, Symone dreams of traveling there someday, of finding herself as a result: It was so empty, so blank, so clean, so dead. Surely, if I was ever to set foot down there, even I might finally exist.

When a weekend jaunt to Paris with her brilliant Uncle Victor leads to a surprise ticket on a three-week polar expedition, Sym is thrilled. At last, she will be able to see the land of her dreams, the place where Oates disappeared almost a hundred years before. When Sym and her fellow travelers land on The Ice, though, she gradually recognizes the true extent of Uncle Victor’s obsession with Antarctica, a mania that goes beyond mere fascination and borders on madness. As Victor embarks on an odyssey to find Symmes’s Hole, a supposed entryway to a hollow earth, it seems he is willing to sacrifice anything and anyone even Sym to reach his goal.

Accomplished, prolific, always surprising author Geraldine McCaughrean has produced another remarkable story in The White Darkness, her first contemporary novel for young adults. With its brutal but beautiful setting, scenes of captivating drama and anguished violence, the narrative deeply probes Sym’s troubled mind. Even as the teenager fights for her life among the dangers of the polar desolation, she questions her own sanity, and her experiences challenge readers, too, to read between the lines and discover her hidden strength and courage, buried not only beneath her outer vulnerability and weaknesses, but also beneath thousands of feet of deadly ice.

Norah Piehl is a writer in the Boston area.

Ten-year-old Moon Blake knows a lot. He knows where to find food in the forest, even in the middle of winter. He knows how to build a fire without a match, how to construct a simple shelter, how to shoot a deer from a hundred yards and how to make his own clothing from the hides. All these things Moon has learned from his father. Pap has also taught Moon to distrust the government just as he does. We never asked for anything and nobody ever gave us anything, Pap says. Because of that, we don't owe anything to anybody. Squatting in a one-room cabin in the middle of the Alabama forests, Moon and Pap have almost no other human contact. When Pap breaks his leg, he refuses to let Moon bring a doctor. Instead, he gives Moon just one piece of advice before he dies from the infection that sets into the wound: head to Alaska, where he'll be able to find other people who live off the land just as Moon has learned to do.

Alaska's a long way from Alabama, though, and Moon soon finds himself on the run from the law. When he lands in a juvenile detention center, Moon discovers that with the loss of his freedom, he gains good food and the first friends he's ever known. When he gets a chance to escape and live off the land once again, will he finally choose a lonely life in the wilderness, or can he learn to trust and live with other people who care for him

In most other wilderness survival novels, young people must travel to the natural world in order to grow up. In his debut novel, Watt Key turns this genre on its head. In spare, unsentimental prose, Key offers a convincing portrait of a young man who is practically a professional in the wilderness but still has a lot to learn when it comes to friendship. Although parts of Moon's story may seem over-the-top, its fast pacing, adventurous storyline and true-to-life details about the natural world combine to produce a strikingly new kind of adventure novel.

Norah Piehl is a freelance writer and editor in the Boston area.

Remember those after-school TV specials where the misunderstood, misfit high school student overcame all odds, learned how to be cool and discovered true love, all in 90 minutes? Well, King Dork is pretty much the total opposite of that. Antihero Tom Henderson (aka King Dork) doesn’t really care about succeeding in high school all he wants is to survive the daily hazing and humiliations that mark his days in the halls of seriously dysfunctional Hillmont High School: We attended our inane, pointless classes, in between which we did our best to dodge random attempts on our lives and dignity by our psychopathic social superiors. Tom’s deeply cynical attitude about life extends not only to his peers but also to his teachers. Most of them, according to Tom, belong to what he dubs the Catcher cult, and they are convinced that, since Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye changed their lives when they were in high school, they will dedicate their lives to bringing the novel to as many other troubled, misfit youth as possible. As it turns out, when Tom discovers a secret code hidden in a copy of The Catcher in the Rye that belonged to his dead feather, the novel might end up changing his life after all but not in ways anyone would have expected. About the only thing Tom isn’t cynical about is music. He and his best friend front a whole series of bands, although their musical activities are mostly limited to coming up with a series of creative band names (Tennis with Guitars), stage names (Love Love and the Prophet Samuel), and album titles ( Amphetamine Low ).

King Dork‘s musical slant, which may remind some readers of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, shouldn’t be any surprise, given that its author is the lead singer/songwriter of punk band The Mr. T Experience. Tom’s expletive-laden narration ( In my head, I’m like a late-night cable comedy special ) walks the fine line between absurdity and brutal honesty and will certainly draw the attention of readers whose own high school experiences are more like a horror movie than an after-school special. Norah Piehl is a freelance writer and editor in the Boston area.