Text Messages: Recommendations for Adolescent Readers

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Episode 4 —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)

Published June 30, 2008

About the Host

Scott Filkins, who firmly believes that reading a good book is one of life’s great joys, worked with a diverse group of teens for nine years as a high school English teacher.

Committed to finding the right books for the readers in his classes, Scott worked with his school librarian to provide engaging reading material for all his students and would frequently buy popular books for independent reading time in his classroom. He started an after school book club called Readers and Leaders to encourage reading outside the classroom. Scott also volunteers for an organization that provides free books to prisoners in the state of Illinois.