In the Company of Owls by Peter Huggins will instantly grab the attention of the reader. It is a delightful, easy to read adventurous story of courage and family loyalty. It also employs humor and wisdom. While reading this novel you can visualize life on a dairy farm from sunrise to sunset. Huggins’ descriptive metaphor such as “hugging a pillow and listening to the crack and pop of the cedar as it glowed and burned in the stone fireplace” gives a feeling of peaceful coexistence with nature. All is well at the end of the day. Unfortunately for the Cash family, their peaceful life will have frightening consequences.

As the follow-up to his first young adult novel Longleaf, author Roger Reid offers Space, the story of teen sleuth Jason Caldwell and his hair-raising discovery of international espionage at a Huntsville, Alabama, observatory. Seizing an opportunity to educate, Reid shares scientific enlightenment while engaging the reader with mysteries that lurk in each chapter of the tales he tells.

Vaughn Vance is not like any American teenager I have ever met, but she is just like every American teenager I know. The protagonist of Susannah Felt’s debut novel This Will Go Down On Your Permanent Record, Vaughn is a sixteen-year-old artist coming of age in a school and a community where she is struggling to fit in, struggling to find her identity somewhere between the giggling, silly girls who used to be her friends and the burnouts and freaks she finds herself hanging out with at a local park known as The Dragon.

One of its back-cover reviewers states that Ted Dunagan’s young adult novel, A Yellow Watermelon, reminds him of To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn. The novel is squarely in Twain territory, but that of Tom Sawyer rather than of Huckleberry Finn. By the same token, it only comes within shouting distance of Harper Lee territory. That is, it is an engaging and well-told adventure story....

Erin Garven is a teenager who desperately wants to connect to her mother who died when she was three days old. The only connection Erin has to her mother is a worn paperback book of To Kill a Mockingbird. The day before her sixteenth birthday, Erin’s father gives her the diary her mother had kept at sixteen. Upon reading a few pages, Erin realizes that she and her mother have a lot in common. Both wanted to become writers. She also discovers that her mother once wrote to Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.