Starred Review Melding his contemporary flair with futuristic elements, Paulsen has crafted a riveting science-fiction adventure. Alone on a hiking trip, young Mark is mysteriously transported to a primitive world by a strange blue flash of lightning. Initially his struggle for survival directly parallels that of Brian Robeson in Paulsen's own Hatchet however, the plot soon evolves into two equally fascinating stages. First, Mark gets caught in the crossfire of warring tribes and becomes a slave. Managing to escape, he heroically saves helpless villagers and is then revered and honored with a banquet that includes tribal dances and gifts of royal treasure. Then, the shocking revelation that he is on Earth in the future, long after a devastating plague-driven holocaust and terrorists' use of nuclear weapons had depopulated the planet, leads Mark into stage three, an odyssey to find the blue light that will lead him home. When a bounty is put out on him, Mark's solitary search becomes a life-or-death race to escape. Replete with the stock characters (boastful warriors, fiery women, comic servants) that flavor the greatest epics, The Transall Saga despite a lame ending, is 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. (Reviewed May 15, 1998)

In a taut time-warp fantasy, thirteen-year-old Mark embarks on his first camping trip alone in the desert expecting beauty and a sense of freedom and serenity, but what he gets is an abrupt transport into an earlier violent era. Using skills that had been merely theoretical and more that he acquires of necessity, Mark faces the new world with determination to survive.

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)

Mysteriously transported to a strange place and time, 13-year-old Mark learns to survive. """"Paulsen works his magic with another wilderness adventure yarn,"""" said PW in a starred review. Ages 10-up. (Oct.)

Gr 5-7--In 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 fianc e 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