Crater

Gr 6 Up—Best known for Rocket Boys (Delacorte, 1998), which has been published in a dozen different languages and then made into both a movie and a musical, Hickam has written another hit, Crater, his first novel for teens. Sixteen-year-old Crater Trueblood is a scragline picker, a menial worker responsible for keeping rocks and debris out of the machinery used for harvesting helium-3 from the surface of the Moon. When he makes a daring decision to save a fellow miner and averts a potentially fatal disaster, the enterprising orphan comes to the attention of the Colonel, who sends him on a secret and, most likely, deadly mission to retrieve a mysterious object. In the company of the Colonel's granddaughter and an amorphous blob of semi-intelligent jelly known as a gillie, the teen finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue and danger where he faces doom at every turn both from subhuman creatures and the inhospitable lunar surface itself. Classic science-fiction storytelling in the style of early Heinlein, humor, and grand adventure permeate every page of this first book in a trilogy. Boys in particular may be inspired to bring back the time-honored tradition of reading by flashlight under the covers.—Jane Henriksen Baird, Anchorage Public Library, AK