As in her debut novel, <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Sights, Vance serves up a potent combination of quirkiness, girl power—and dire menace. Two very different girls alternate as narrators. Birdie, 13, is the highly indulged but likable only child of intellectual Oregon parents who decide to spend a year on a Caribbean island. Morgan, 17, has been raised at sea by her Norwegian parents and her speech, she explains, "is marked from being a reader more than a speaker, and from never having lived in any of the countries whose languages I understand." Confident Birdie believes she has been through "<EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">a lot," listing among her "hardships" that "my parents spend too much time thinking about me." By contrast, the anachronistically voiced, dour Morgan must struggle for survival: as her hard-drinking parents soak up still more rum at a bar in Panama, she sails away without them ("Now I circle the ocean alone, the child of a Viking mother"). The threads connecting these opposite characters remain mysterious for a lengthy interval—during which Birdie is kidnapped by a sociopath calling himself Nicholas, to whom Morgan turns for help when she needs false papers to secure her independence until she comes of age. The girls' fates intertwine in the last 50 or so pages, when the pace quickens dramatically. Neither narrator has the offbeat charm of <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">Sights's Baby Girl and the plot lines here require more energy to pursue. A message about positive thinking, loosely threaded throughout Birdie's narrative, resounds clearly at the end. Ages 12-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(May)

Two bright teenage girls alternately narrate a story that bursts with colorful characters and plot lines, not all of which are seen through to the end. Thirteen-year-old Birdie, only child of intellectual parents seems at first to have nothing more difficult in her life than a rather nasty best friend with a manipulative mother. Seventeen-year-old Morgan, on the other hand, is alone at sea aboard her parents' sailing boat, while her parents, grieving over the death of Morgan's older sister, are elsewhere, drowning their sorrows in rum. The two stories connect halfway through the novel, after Birdie is kidnapped at the outset of a family vacation and held captive by a charismatic psychopath to whom runaway Morgan turns for documents that she needs to evade being picked up by the Coast Guard. There are enough improbabilities here to keep the terror at a distance for the reader, but also enough realism to make gripping reading. The kidnapper's manipulations and the girls' brave responses come together in an engaging suspense yarn.

Gr 6-8-Two totally dissimilar girls meet under extreme circumstances. Birdie, 13, is the coddled only child of highly educated professionals living in a small town in Oregon. Morgan, 16, is the only surviving child of a couple who dropped out of life in Norway to sail the seven seas in a small clipper. Both teens become the prey of a handsome, charismatic psychopath based on a small private island in the Caribbean and must team up to save their lives. Alternating first-person chapters provide ample evidence of their contrasting temperaments and experiences. Birdie is voluble and expansive-sometimes to the brink of tedium. Morgan is matter-of-fact and affects emotional detachment. Birdie has known little trouble in her life; she occasionally suffers severe asthma attacks, but otherwise she has existed swathed in the cocoon of her parents' love and attention. Morgan's baby brother was stillborn at sea, her beloved older sister drowned-swept overboard by a giant wave-and her parents have lapsed so deeply into alcoholism that Morgan has taken their boat and abandoned them in desperation. Their individual trajectories to the crude wooden cage wedged in an abandoned well in which they are imprisoned make for interesting reading. However, they pale next to the descriptions of the teens' interaction once they are together and the taut, suspenseful story of their escape. This adventure will keep readers turning the pages to see what happens next.-Miriam Lang Budin, Chappaqua Public Library, NY Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Two wildly dissimilar teenage girls find themselves thrown together on a Caribbean island, fighting for their lives. Birdie, 13, has grown up in Oregon, the bright and bubbly only daughter of loving and protective parents. Morgan, 17, has grown up on a sailboat, the bright but in no way bubbly daughter of unconventional and emotionally distant parents. Birdie and her parents have left Oregon, intending to live for a year on a small tropical island; Morgan has abandoned her alcoholic parents in Panama, charting an independent course to a neighboring island. They both run afoul of the highly dangerous Nick, to whom Morgan applies for false papers and who first charms and then kidnaps Birdie. This rather preposterous plot is bolstered by the development of two engaging voices, each telling her own story in alternating chapters, and revealing unexpected similarities. Birdie's gregariousness masks her keen loneliness; Morgan's self-inflicted solitude does the same. While the story could have been cut considerably and a key subplot is left hanging, this offering nevertheless presents readers with both high drama and compelling characterization. (Fiction. 12+)

The stories of two dramatically different young girls alternate in an unusual novel that is equal parts character study and thriller. In the Caribbean with her family, Birdie is kidnapped by a psychotic criminal. When runaway Morgan approaches the same man for false papers, he kidnaps her as well. The unique characterizations have a touch of the quirkiness, and even humor, of Vance's first novel, Sights.