Kirjahaku

Nominated for the 2019 Red Maple Fiction Award When Tristan’s dad disappears, he puts his tracking skills to the test to find him — but will Tristan’s talents save him if it turns out to be a trap? Thanks to his dad’s coaching, sixteen-year-old Tristan is one of the best climbers and trackers in his small town. He can read footprints and bushes like they’re security-camera footage, and fearlessly descend rock faces and waterfalls. But when his father disappears, leaving his mother too grief-stricken to function, the young canyoneer’s life goes into freefall. Left in the hands of a well-meaning but incompetent uncle and a space-cadet housekeeper, Tristan finds life a struggle no matter how hard he works. When he nears the end of his rope at home, the teen decides to set off into Swallow Canyon in search of his father — only to realize that someone may be out to get him. Now the question is who’s stalking whom, and are Tristan’s skills up to the dangerous game playing out in the deep, shadowy canyon?

2020 Red Maple Fiction Award — Shortlisted • 2021 Chocolate Lily Award — Winner“The fast-paced and suspenseful plot will keep readers rooting for Owen, Arturo, and the others.” —School Library JournalOwen’s plan to sail away on an adventure puts him on a collision course with some very dangerous people.When Owen’s parents leave him on his own for a week, the sixteen-year-old gets bored and hatches a crazy idea: sneak onto the yacht that’s visiting the sleepy Pacific Coast island where he lives and stow away on an adventure! Once on board the vessel, Owen quickly finds this is anything but innocent fun. The ship is packed with teenagers from Central America, and it looks like Owen has stumbled into a people-smuggling operation.Complications pile up and as things head from bad to worse, a haunting incident from Owen’s past tightens its grip on him. There’s only one way to break free and make his way home. Owen and the first mate, Arturo — a former street kid — must work together to commandeer the boat and win the trust of those on board. But who’s friend and who’s foe in the shifting tides?

Ray will need every ounce of his drone skills and outdoor smarts to recover his missing bear cub before poachers get to it first.When his orphan bear cub goes missing, sixteen-year-old drone enthusiast Ray McLellan decides to use his airborne spying skills to find it. Little does he know that an evil bear-poaching gang operating in the surrounding forest has drones, too — and a cold welcome for those who would attempt to take them down.As a New York City kid recently forced to move to the Great Bear Rainforest by his parents, Ray doesn’t have a lifetime of outdoor instincts or familiarity with the valley and its wildlife. That makes him very different from his grumpy grandfather, who — like his new school friends — berates his city-kid uselessness at every opportunity. Can Ray use his drones and smarts to prove himself, find his cub, and expose what’s going on in the woods?

Will their wilderness skills be enough to survive the dangerous Rocky Mountains?First a Canadian Rockies avalanche kills their parents. Then Children’s Services threatens to separate them. That’s when the three Gunnarsson kids decide to run away into the mountains and fend for themselves until the oldest turns eighteen and becomes their legal guardian. Not many would dare. But Jon, Korka, and Aron’s parents ran a survival school.Turns out their plan is full of holes. When food and equipment go missing and illness and injury strike, things get scary. They’re even less prepared for encounters with dangerous animals and a sketchy woods dweller. On top of that, grief, cold, hunger, and sibling infighting threaten to tear them apart, while the search parties are closing in on them. Do Jon, Korka, and Aron really have what it takes to survive?

This time, when Jake and Peter stumble upon adrenaline-pumping adventure, it s high in the peaks of the Bugaboo Mountains just west of the Rockies. Fifteen-year-old Jake is obsessed with solo-climbing a soaring granite spire. His best friend, Peter, is as absorbed with filming Jake for a video as he is in not divulging his secret fear of heights to the runaway girl who joins them. Though a talented climber, the surly runaway girl seems possessed by a death wish. When Jake arrives at the halfway mark and cheerfully hangs his overnight cot on anchors at a death-defying 150-storey height above the ground, all seems well, but the next day, a lightning storm begins to unravel this carefully planned high-risk adventure. When a crisis prompts the girl to put her life at stake for Jake, it falls to Peter to overcome his fear to get everyone home safely. Packed with mountaineering lore and cliff-hanging tension, Vertical Limits features adventures in competitive gym climbing, outdoor urban climbing, and wilderness rock climbing.

Just as sixteen-year-old Andreo, skilled in death-defying ironman events in wilderness regions, is about to compete in rugged Bolivia, he and his friend Raul (another Bolivian adoptee) begin to suspect that their adoptive parents have unwittingly acquired them illegally. Plotting to use the upcoming race to pursue the truth, they veer on an epic journey to locate Andreo's birth parents, only to find themselves hazardously entangled with a gang of baby traffickers. Never suspecting that attempting to bring down the ring would endanger their very lives, the boys plunge ahead. Compelling, poignant, and heart-stopping, "Andreo's Race" takes readers on a perilous quest to discover the true meaning of family.

Hudson Greer and his caving partner, Jett, are determined to become teen legends who discover a long-sought passageway that connects two giant cave systems in their little mountain town. But they're haunted by the history of a giant sinkhole that opened up and swallowed the town's fully-packed church, steeple and all. Dozens were killed, including Hudson’s grandfather. Hudson knows it's in danger of happening again; he just doesn't know when or where. Can his caving instincts and science knowledge predict or prevent the next disaster? Are the shoddy logging practices of the town's main employer tempting fate? And who's on whose side when business and political shenanigans mix with evaded environmental codes?Nothing less than the lives of the townspeople are at stake — and it's up to Hudson to separate myth from fact, and get key players working together, before it's too late.