My books of the year

by Susan Anderson
Wednesday, December 26, 2007 12:05 PM MST

One of the good things about having your children leave behind their little-kid years to become “young adults” is discovering young adult books yourself.

This age group seems to be attracting terrific authors that the rest of us like to read too, and the Harry Potter series is just the beginning.

“Peter and the Starcatchers” opened a new series in 2004 that goes back in fiction to before J.M Barrie’s “Peter Pan” to imagine how Neverland started, what happened to Captain Hook’s hand and how Peter learned to fly, among many other things.

A co-author is one of the funniest columnists, Dave Barry (author of such silliness as “Dave Barry's Complete Guide to Guys” and “The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog”).

Novelist Ridley Pearson is the other writer of this series, which starts when Peter and other orphans from St. Norbert’s Home for Wayward Boys are cruelly shipped off to be slaves of the evil King of Rundoon. A brave, smart girl named Molly steps in to help rescue them and become Peter’s best friend and ally.

There are falling stars, magical gold treasure, a pirate named Black Stache, talking dolphins and action that won’t quit. I loved reading this book with my daughter, never realizing that it was the start of a series that now has reached three books.

We were reading the second book, “Peter and the Shadow Thieves,” when the plot that involved a lunar eclipse taking place at Stonehenge was mirrored with a lunar eclipse that we could see here in Casper. So we learned a little astronomy and Celtic history along the way.

Back to real history

“The Book Thief” by Markus Zusak also goes back in time, but this is to a real time in history, Germany during World War II. This is published as a young adult book, but it’s more touching and challenging than 98 percent of books written for us old adults.

In fact, it would take an unusual 12-year-old to handle this story of Liesel, an orphaned girl living with foster parents in Munich. Her foster father is a musician and house painter, who is having trouble getting work because he doesn’t want to join the Nazi Party.

Then there is the Jewish man living in the basement, before being captured and sent to the Dachau concentration camp just down the road.

The details of living in near-starvation become so clear that you feel hungry through every page. Poverty means that Liesel, who loves books, at first has only one book, the guide for undertakers that she picked up from the ground at the cemetery after burying her little brother.

Soon she steals a book left after a Nazi book burning, and then her life of crime takes her into the beautiful library in the mayor’s home. It is writing her own book that saves her life, in many ways.

The author himself grew up in Australia, hearing stories from his parents of how ordinary people struggled to live decent lives in Nazi Germany.

He does write about the concerns of children’s books, from bullies on the playground to a foster mother who seems like an overbearing fussbudget who can make meals out of nothing, but has moments of amazing kindness.

But, beginning with the narrator being Death and continuing through the actions of people who have at least two shades of good and bad in their personalities, it’s clear that this story is wise beyond its heroine’s years.

When I finished it, I told people it was the best book I had ever read.

Then I read the next book on this list.

“Three Cups of Tea”

Greg Mortenson was living a climbing bum’s life when he failed to summit the world’s second highest mountain, K2, got lost and stumbled into Korphe, a remote village high in the Pakistani Himalayas.

The people, who had virtually no contact with the outside world, fed him yak-butter tea and nursed him back to life.

He started to learn their language and discovered that their school was a bitterly cold field where children wrote numbers in the dirt and were visited by a teacher for a few days a week.

Mortenson decided to build a school for Korphe. He returned to living out of his car in Berkeley, Calif., while working as an emergency room nurse to support himself and tried to raise money for the school.

At first, he wrote 300 letters asking for money and received one response -- a donation from television journalist Tom Brokaw.

The road to building Korphe’s school was unbelievably long and complicated. Mortenson was kidnapped, came close to being murdered, was swindled and had to build a bridge with the materials he had gathered for the school.

But he finally built a school that also welcomed girls in the heart of Taliban-controlled country. Friends hid him when the news of the 9-ll attacks filtered through to the countryside.

Now, many years later, he has led a campaign to build hundreds of schools, all of which include girls. The subtitle of his book is “One Man's Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations ... One School at a Time.”

Now I tell people that this is the best book I ever read, and it’s a story that needs to be retold to younger generations.

In addition to all of its messages of persistence, idealism and courage, it should convince any young adult in our culture that school is a very precious blessing.

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