Young Adult Adventures

Try these books if you're looking for:

• Teen reads
• Adventure books
• Clean reads
• Read like J.K. Rowling, Rick Riordan, Orson Scott Card, Lois Lowry, Madeleine L'Engle, Suzanne Collins

Hero and the Crown 
By Robin McKinley
YA FICTION MCKINLEY
Aerin never knew her mother, who passed away shortly after Aerin’s birth. The Kingdom needed a new hero, but there was no male heir. No one suspected that Aerin was destined to be the true hero who would earn her place in her father’s court by defeating dragons and battling evil sorcerers. Well-wrought epic fantasy.

Peter and the Starcatchers 

By Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson
YA FICTION BARRY
This terrific story is a prequel to Peter Pan. The reader is introduced to Peter—an orphan—who sails from England on the ship Never Land. On board he meets Molly, a young Starcatcher, whose mission is to guard a trunk of magical stardust from a greedy pirate and the native inhabitants of a remote island. A fast, fun read.

I Hated Heaven: A Novel of Love After Death 
By Kenny Kemp
FICTION KEMP
Tom and April are a young, married couple. Tom is a religious believer but April is not. Tom suffers an accident at work and on his deathbed he promises that he will somehow let April know if there is life after death. Heaven turns out to be nothing like he expected: he’s issued a cell phone, a day planner, and sent to classes such as “basic paradise skills”. Tom risks his soul to keep his promise to April. This is a delightful read with some unexpected twists and turns.

Graceling
By Kristin Cashore
YA FICTION CASHORE
Throughout the Seven Kingdoms are Gracelings—persons with special abilities ranging from the mundane to the magical. Katsa is a Graceling with a dangerous and exploitable grace—a gift for killing. Struggling to find her place in the world, Katsa learns that the Graces are not always what they seem. Part fantasy and part romance, Graceling features a vivid world and meticulously crafted characters.

Read-alikes for Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, or Kurt Vonnegut

Try these books if you're looking for:

• Read-alikes for Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card, or Kurt Vonnegut

The Forever War 
By Joe Haldeman
SCIFI HALDEMAN Forever #1
This award winning book features a reluctant hero,Captain Mandella, insights into human behavior, anti-war sentiments and a similar moral stance to many of Card’s books. Captain Mandella must perform his duties and do whatever it takes to survive before returning back home to an aging Earth. 




Blue Girl
By Charles DeLint
YA F DELINT  
DeLint, like Gaiman’s protagonists, live in a world resembling ours but contain differences that make the line between our world and the fantasy world just a bit blurry.  





Bellwether
By Connie Willis
SCIFI WILLIS  
If the reason you like Vonnegut is his sarcasm, poking fun at contemporary culture and satire you might enjoy Bellwether, the story of a sociologist who studies fads and a chaos theorist who are brought together when an unusual package is misdelivered.>

Catch 22

By Joseph Heller
F HELLER
Heller's Catch 22 is classic satire on the insanity of war. Heller and Vonnegut write with similar wit and sarcasm.

Orson Scott Card read-alikes

Try these books if you're looking for:

• Books similar to those by Orson Scott Card

Halo: the Fall of Reach
By Eric S. Nylund
SCI-FI NYLUND Halo #1
Before the Human-Covenant War engulfed Halo, the planet-colony Reach came under attack by the Covenant, and Earth's specially trained and augmented warriors, code-named SPARTANs, stood alone to fight for humanity's survival.

The Dangerous Days of Daniel X
By James Patterson
YA F PATTERSO Daniel X #1
Fifteen-year-old Daniel has followed in his parents' footsteps as the Alien Hunter, exterminating beings on The List of Alien Outlaws on Terra Firma, but when he faces his first of the top ten outlaws, the very existence of Earth and another planet are at stake.

Emperor
By Stephen Baxter
SCI-FI BAXTER Time’s #1
A first installment of a four-book alternate history epic traces the rise of a powerful family whose successes are linked to an ancient prophecy that guides their financial and political choices.

Contact
By Carl Sagan
SCI-FI SAGAN
December, 1999, the dawn of the millennium. A team of international scientists is poised for the most fantastic adventure in human history. After years of scanning the galaxy for signs of somebody or something else, this team believes they've found a message from an intelligent source, and they travel deep into space to meet it. Who or what is out there?

Hidden Empire
By Kevin J. Anderson
SCI-FI ANDERSON Seven Su #1
Captain Cole becomes increasingly concerned about new U.S. President Averell Torrent's tough-handed foreign policy stance, a perspective that causes him to be targeted and prompts his investigation into the president's role in an assassination plot.

Fantasy or Science Fiction with Well-Developed Characters

Try these books if you're looking for:

• Science fiction or fantasy
• Well-developed characters
• Read-alikes for Orson Scott Card

The Gilded Chain: A Tale of The King's Blades
By Dave Duncan
SCIFI DUNCAN
Sir Durendal, the leader of the King's Blades, the finest swordsmen in the magical land of Chivial, embarks on a quest for a glorious treasure that lies behind the walls of an ancient, isolated city where danger and death are everywhere. This is part of the King's Blades series, but each book stands alone.

Lord of the Isles
By David Drake
SCIFI DRAKE
Mysteriously transported one thousand years into the future after a cataclysm destroys the empire of the Isles, a woman sorcerer finds herself in a small town, far from the centers of power, where she and a small group of individuals become the focus of a new struggle for dominance.

Under Heaven
By Guy Gavriel Kay
SCIFI KAY
In the mountains of Kitai a young soldier, Shen Tai, has spent two years alone, burying the dead of both sides at a battle site. He does this to honor his late father, the commanding general in the last imperial war. At night he can hear ghosts crying. When a voice falls silent, he knows that a spirit has been granted rest. One morning he is quite surprised to learn that the court of Kitai’s recent enemy has chosen to honor him by granting him 250 coveted western horses. This is a gift fit for the emperor and can bring Tai great power—or get him killed in short order.

The Ring of Five Dragons
By Eric Lustbader
SCIFI LUSTBADE
After suffering for a century under the oppressive V'ornn invaders, the Kundalan people put their hopes on Dar Sala-at, a hero foretold by prophecy, who can wield the sorcerous power of the lost Ring of Five Dragons to save his people.

Eragon
By Christopher Paolini
YA F PAOLINI
In Alagaesia, a fifteen-year-old boy of unknown lineage called Eragon finds a mysterious stone that weaves his life into an intricate tapestry of destiny, magic, and power, peopled with dragons, elves, and monsters.

Fantasy or Science Fiction Similar to that of Orson Scott Card

Try these books if you're looking for:

• Fantasy or Science Fiction
• Read-alikes for Orson Scott Card or Brandon Sanderson
• Emphasis on the human experience

The Ring of Five Dragons
By Eric Lustbader
SCIFI LUSTBADE
After suffering for a century under the oppressive V'ornn invaders, the Kundalan people put their hopes on Dar Sala-at, a hero foretold by prophecy, who can wield the sorcerous power of the lost Ring of Five Dragons to save his people.

Lord of the Isles
By David Drake
SCIFI DRAKE
Mysteriously transported one thousand years into the future after a cataclysm destroys the empire of the Isles, a woman sorcerer finds herself in a small town, far from the centers of power, where she and a small group of individuals become the focus of a new struggle for dominance.

Dies the Fire
By S. M. Stirling
SCIFI STIRLING When a strange electrical storm over the island of Nantucket suddenly causes all electronic devices to cease to function, the world is faced with an unimaginable transformation.

Action/Adventure Sci-Fi

Try these books if you are looking for:

• Sci-Fi
• Action/Adventure
• Military Sci-Fi
• Read-alikes for Orson Scott Card
• Read-alikes for David Weber

The Knife of Never Letting Go
By Patrick Ness
YA F NESS
The settlers of New World set out to colonize a new planet, but they didn’t realize that when they got there a germ would infect them, making every man’s thoughts heard aloud, and killing all of the women. Todd Hewitt is just a month away from becoming a man, but for reasons he doesn’t understand he is forced to flee his town with only his dog, whose voice he hears too. With hostile men from the town in pursuit, Todd searches for answers about his colony's past while trying to avoid danger that is getting closer every minute…

Halo: The Fall of Reach
By Eric S. Nylund
SCI-FI NYLUND
Before the Human-Covenant War engulfed Halo, the planet-colony Reach came under attack by the Covenant, and Earth's specially trained and augmented warriors, code-named SPARTANs, stood alone to fight for humanity's survival.

The Forge
By S.M. Stirling
SCI-FI STIRLING
On a planet that was once part of a vast interstellar civilization, humans survive on the edge of barbarism amid the ruins of the once-great empire.

The Supernaturalist
By Eoin Colfer
YA F COLFER
In futuristic Satellite City, fourteen-year-old Cosmo Hill escapes from his abusive orphanage and teams up with three other people who share his unusual ability to see supernatural creatures, and together they determine the nature and purpose of the swarming blue Parasites that are invisible to most humans.

His Majesty’s Dragon
By Naomi Novak
SCI-FI NOVAK
When the HMS Reliant captures a French ship and its priceless cargo, an unhatched dragon egg, Captain Will Laurence is swept into an unexpected kinship with an extraordinary creature and joins the elite Aerial Corps as a master of the dragon Temaraire, in which role he must match wits with the powerful dragon-borne forces of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Science Fiction--Orson Scott Card or Robert Jordan Read-alikes

Try these books if you're looking for:

• Science Fiction
• No romance
• Orson Scott Card read-alikes
• Robert Jordan read-alikes

Doomsday Book
By Connie Willis
SCIFI Willis
A crisis linking the past and future strands an Oxford student in the most dangerous year of the Middle Ages.

Fahrenheit 451
By Ray Bradbury
SCIFI Bradbury
A totalitarian regime has ordered all books to be destroyed, but one of the book burners suddenly realizes their merit.

The Forever War
By Joe Haldeman
SCIFI Haldeman
Drafted into the ranks of Earth's interstellar warriors, private William Mandella finds his fight against the Taurans secondary to the side-effects of faster-than-light space travel, which affects the rate at which he ages.

Foundation
By Isaac Asimov
SCIFI Asimov
A band of psychologists, under the leadership of psychohistorian Hari Seldon, plant a colony to encourage art, science, and technology in the declining Galactic Empire and to preserve the accumulated knowledge of humankind.