Action & Adventure

Published in 1980, John Reynolds Gardiner’s debut children’s novel, Stone Fox is a beloved children’s story. Included on the 1980 New York Times Notable Books of the Year listing, Stone Fox sold millions of copies and was even adapted into a television show in 1987. The short children’s novel tells the story of Little Willy, a young boy who lives on a farm in Wyoming with his grandfather and his dog, Searchlight. The story follows... Read Stone Fox Summary

Stormbreaker, published in 2000, is the first novel in the Alex Rider series by British author Anthony Horowitz. It is a YA action-adventure novel that follows 14-year-old Alex Rider as he is recruited as a spy by MI6. The novel explores The Moral Complexities of Espionage, Perseverance in the Face of Difficulty, and The Interplay of Technology and Espionage. The book was adapted into the 2006 film Alex Rider: Operation Stormbreaker, although the movie made... Read Stormbreaker Summary

In Roland Smith’s 2011 adventure novel, Storm Runners, three middle-grade students struggle to survive and find shelter during a hurricane after their school bus crashes. While a team of rescuers drives toward the disaster in search of the missing kids, the three students use all their skills and brainpower simply to stay alive.Award-winning author Smith spent decades working as a zookeeper and world-traveling animal rescuer. He has turned his experiences into award-winning novels and non-fiction... Read Storm Runners Summary

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Stuart Little (1945) is E. B. White’s first children’s book—the collected stories of Stuart, a mouse-boy born into a human family. White was a journalist and humorist who wrote for the United Press, the Seattle Times, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine. He received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Prize in 1970 for contributions to children’s literature for the much beloved Charlotte’s Web, and in 1973, The Trumpet of the Swan won the Sequoyah... Read Stuart Little Summary

Stung is a 2013 work of young adult fiction by Bethany Wiggins. The setting is a near-future dystopia in which honeybees are extinct, resulting in famine and a breakdown of societal infrastructures. As 17-year-old Fiona Tarsis battles both beasts and humans in an effort to stay alive and learn the truth, the novel explores themes of humanity and violence through the lens of gender dynamics. Stung earned a Starred Review from Kirkus; a sequel, Cured... Read Stung Summary

In Mike Lupica’s Summer Ball, published in 2007, 13-year-old Danny Walker heads to an elite basketball summer camp called Right Way. Here, he will match his nationally-recognized skills against some of the best young basketball players in the country. The New York Times-bestselling novelpicks up where Lupica’s previous novel, Travel Team, leaves off: Walker, cut from his local Middletown basketball travel team because he’s too short, leads his new team to the seventh-grade national championship... Read Summer Ball Summary

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A loose adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, Guadalupe Garcia McCall’s Summer of the Mariposas (2012) follows five Mexican American sisters on an epic journey from Texas to Mexico. Drawing deeply from Mexican folklore, the book’s genre blends magical realism and fantasy. The book was a 2013 Andre Norton Award Nominee, won the Westchester Fiction Award, and made the list of 2012 School Library Journal Best Books. Guadalupe Garcia McCall was born in Piedras Negras in Coahuila... Read Summer of the Mariposas Summary

Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls is a middle grade historical novel first published in 1976. Set in rural Oklahoma’s Ozark Mountains in the late 1800s, the story follows 14-year-old Jay Berry Lee as he tries to capture a group of monkeys that escaped from their circus train. The monkeys, and especially the chimpanzee who leads them, prove themselves wily adversaries for Jay Berry, who desperately wants the reward money that will accompany their... Read Summer of the Monkeys Summary

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Swindle is a middle-grade novel published in 2008 by Canadian American author Gordon Korman. In the story, 6th-grader Griffin Bing enlists a group of his classmates to retrieve a rare Babe Ruth baseball card from an unscrupulous collector known as Swindle, who has conned Griffin out of the card. The book is the first of eight books, as of 2019, in the popular Swindle series. Nickelodeon made a film of the same name based on the novel in... Read Swindle Summary

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Tarzan of the Apes is an adventure fiction book written by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912 and initially published serially in the pulp magazine The All-Story before being printed as a novel in 1914. Burroughs was an American from Chicago who had a variety of careers before building a name for himself as a writer of pulp fiction. His first story, entitled Under the Moons of Mars (1911), became the first book in the science... Read Tarzan of the Apes Summary

Watt Key’s 2016 children’s adventure novel, Terror at Bottle Creek, follows a group of children as they attempt to survive a hurricane that strikes the swamps and rivers of Alabama. This study guide uses the first edition published by Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers in 2016. Plot SummaryCort is 13 years old and lives with his father on a riverboat in Alabama, along with his cherished dog, Catfish. His father works as a... Read Terror at Bottle Creek Summary

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