The Death-Defying Pepper Roux, by Geraldine McCaughrean, $17.09. For nearly all 14 years of his life, Paul Roux has been called “Pepper,” a nickname that grew out of “le pauvre,” which is what his malicious aunt calls him. Invoking St. Constance, the aunt predicts at Pepper’s birth that he will be dead by age 14.
This casts a pall over the Roux family. Pepper’s mother babies him. During shore leaves, his lout of a seafaring dad expresses astonishment that Pepper is still alive.
It imbues Pepper with a resigned fatalism that, upon his 14th birthday, inspires him to constantly reinvent himself — by turns, he becomes a sea captain, a butcher, a reporter, a horse handler, a telegram deliverer, a Foreign Legion mercenary — while waiting for death’s cold hand.
The episodic plot reads like a series of brisk short stories, mesmerizing more in details than as a whole. One excellent recurring character is a cross-dressing steward. The magic is in the sly details: Pepper’s ship is called “L’Ombrage”; an earnest confession that employs a hydraulic tube system; the people complicit with Pepper’s well-intended deceptions; telegrams bearing only good or noble news; and more. Ages 9 to 12.
Woods Runner, by Gary Paulsen, $15.99. Set during the Revolutionary War, the latest novel from the prolific Paulsen is so absorbing that it will snare even students who think history is boring.
Routed from his home in the wilds of Pennsylvania, young Samuel, 13, finds his neighbors and others killed by British troops. When he learns that his parents are prisoners of war, Samuel heads to Ground Zero — British headquarters in New York City — to free them.
En route, he meets another young war victim, some friends and some enemies. Between chapters, Paulsen injects facts that become indelibly memorable. Did you know that 1,000 American prisoners of war were kept on a ship built for 350 and that their only latrines were an insufficient amount of buckets? Ages 13 and up.
Cosmic, by Frank Cottrell Boyce, $16.99. Where does an author go after providing previous protagonists with armloads of money (“Millions”) and a valuable Van Gogh painting? To the moon, Alice!
Prematurely tall enough to be mistaken for an adult, young Liam, age 12, uses a combination of duplicity and luck to win a spot on a spaceship for himself and his friend, Florida. It sounds like a lark until Liam and a handful of others find themselves off-orbit and 200,000 miles away from Earth.
“Cosmic” is Liam’s alternately proud and embarrassed explanation of how he got there. In Boyce’s hands, it sounds more possible than improbable. Have movie execs started the bidding wars for the book rights yet? Ages 11 to 13.
Gemma, by Meg Tilly, $15.95. Gripping and merciless, this is a story about a girl used as a sexual pawn by her abusive mother’s boyfriend. Tilly, often cast as a waif in two dozen 1980s and ’90s movies, based “Gemma” on her own horrific childhood experience after being multiply abused by men in her family.
Recounting an exchange with an obtuse child therapist, Gemma makes it abundantly clear why molested and abused children rarely manage to escape their abusers:
“Only so many times could I try to run away. He was just going to catch me again. And when he caught me, things were worse, way worse, the beatings. And nobody, nobody would help me . . . I told her all this, how I tried, how it just didn’t work . . . but she . . . asked me, real patient, if maybe I liked Hazen, liked being with him.” Let’s hope “Gemma” helps the victims who recognize themselves in this book. Ages 13 and up.
January’s Sparrow, by Patricia Polacco, $22.99. The latest heartstring-tugger from Polacco looks at both the tension and cooperation between black and white Americans involved in fighting slavery in the 1840s. After making it to Michigan, the Crosswhite family’s freedom is threatened.
The dramatic intervention of townsfolk (black and white) fending off the slave-hunters is a heartening illustration of nonviolent triumph. Fictional but historically based. Ages 8 to 12.
