Paulsen (Brian's Winter) works his magic with another wilderness adventure yarn. But the wilderness this time isn't in this worldor is it? That's what 13-year-old Mark tries to discover. On his first solo backpacking trip, crossing an old missile range in a desert out west, a mysterious blue light transports him to a thick red jungle under a sulfurous sky. There the struggle for survival soon supersedes the quest for the route home. Paulsen draws on such Saturday-matinee staples as poisonous insects, deadly quicksand and murderous beasts; Mark even swings on vines with a friendly monkey-like creature (and this is just the first 30 pages). Yet the plot feels fresh, thanks to the author's taut, unsentimental storytelling (Mark's Tarzan-esque antics, for example, result in broken ribs). Mark grows to manhood in the four or so years of his sojourn; the narrative, meanwhile, continues at a hurtling pace. The teen saves a girl's life, then joins her tribe of forest-dwellers; later, he is captured with them and enslaved by the more technologically advanced Tsook people. There are raids, escapes and brushes with the Tsook overlord, the Merkon, who takes a frighteningly keen interest in Mark. Readers may figure out who the Merkon is long before the protagonist does, but no matterthe action along the way (including just the right dash of romance) is never less than enthralling. While the story is self-contained, the end points to a sequel, so, with any luck, another installment is on the way. Ages 12-up. (May)

Gr 5-7In this rare venture into middle-grade science fiction, Paulsen catapults a modern teenager several thousand years into a future in which mutated humans are just beginning to recover from a worldwide plague. Hiking alone, Mark falls into a time warp and wakes up in a jungle inhabited by strange, almost-familiar creatures. As he uses makeshift methods to survive and searches for the roving warp, he encounters successively more civilized, web-footed people, and works his way, as years pass, up from slave to respected warrior. After fighting a war leader known as "The Merkon" (get it? Merkon? American?), who turns out to be a convict from his own era, Mark leads the tyrant's army away from his friends and fiance before the warp snatches him back and drops him in a 1990s mall. He becomes a doctor, dedicated to finding a cure for Ebola. As Paulsen fans will expect, Mark's efforts at solo survival are engrossingly credible-funny and disgusting at times, too-but the characters are only a bit less typecast than the cultures in which they live, and the violent, contrivance-ridden plot demands readers as uncritical as a protagonist who can, in all seriousness, conclude that "in this world, war and killing weren't a part of life, they were life" (whatever that means). It's a thin bit of storytelling, but a quick read, divided into very short chapters and lit by flickers of the old Paulsen magic.John Peters, New York Public Library

Paulsen (My Life in Dog Years, 1998, etc.), treading water, offers a competent fantasy-adventure about a boy who is time- warped into a primitive world, undergoes the hero's journey, and proves he can get the girl and still go home again. Mark, 13, is thrilled to spend a few days in the desert camping, until a mysterious light transports him to a place and time not his own. When he comes upon other people, recognizable but clearly different from himself, he sees that he is in a society close to that of the first peoples in North America. The language is plain, action-oriented, and always driven toward cliff-hanging chapter endings, but there is little in the way of character development. Instead the story is filled with some powerful if old-fashioned archetypes engaged in fairly primal give-and-take: Mark kills a horrible beast and thereby rescues a young maiden from its clutches; he kills or outsmarts all enemies; he is accepted as a warrior and undergoes ceremonial tributes as such; he's sweet to younger children; and prepares to marry the chief's daughter. Other than referring to pizza and his parents once or twice, Mark is at home as a warrior/survivor; his former life falls away even as he searches for the way back to the present. In the end, the light brings a 17-year-old Mark back from what was a future brought about by a great epidemic; his readjustment is unremarked upon. Readers last glimpse Mark as an adult, trying to find a vaccine for the virus behind the epidemic. (Fiction. 10- 14)

Gary Paulsen, bestselling author of Brian's Winter, brings us a new dimension in adventure with The Transall Saga.

* "[A] world of rare charm, a captivating, well-realized realm, where fantastical elements force the protagonist to discover and employ the greatest strengths of his humanity."
—Booklist, starred

Time-travel, science fiction, survival and adventure: the plot prescription for a winning audiobook? Perhaps. While veteran narrator Johnny Heller ably recounts the story of 13-year-old Mark Harrison, time-traveler to a post-apocalyptic earth, he must endeavor to wring every fragment of feeling from a text mostly lacking in emotion. Paulsen's novel, with its tight, limited focus on plot at the expense of character, offers Heller little meat in its cast of stock characters. As a result, secondary characters are sometimes indistinguishable. Only Sarbo, a warrior and champion, is clearly drawn. While this recording isn't poorly executed, given the limitations of the text, it's simply lackluster. T.B. © AudioFile, Portland, Maine