Belly’s dawning awareness of her sexuality and that of the boys is a strong theme, as is the sense of summer as a separate and reflective time and place: Readers get glimpses of kisses on the beach, her best friend’s flirtations during one summer’s visit, a first date. Han’s leisurely paced, somewhat somber narrative revisits several beach-house summers in flashback through the eyes of now 15-year-old Isabel, known to all as Belly.īelly measures her growing self by these summers and by her lifelong relationship with the older boys, her brother and her mother’s best friend’s two sons. This is the first book in a series planned by the author, and may prove useful for reluctant readers looking for excitement. The plot is, of course, preposterous, but young readers won’t care as they zoom through numerous cliffhangers. Thereafter he survives murderous ATV drivers, an underwater swim in an abandoned mine, and an encounter with a Portuguese man-o-war jellyfish before hitching a ride on an already airborne plane. After surviving brutal training and armed with stealthy spy tools, Alex infiltrates Sayles’s operation as the teenage tester of the “Stormbreaker,” a new computer Sayles is giving to British schools. He learns that Ian was a spy, and reluctantly joins Britain’s MI6 intelligence agency.

He narrowly escapes being crushed in the car as it’s demolished, then climbs out of a 15-story window to break into Ian’s office. Suspicious of the official explanation, he investigates and finds Ian’s car riddled with bullet holes. Alex begins as an innocent boy shocked by the death of his Uncle Ian in a traffic accident. Non-stop action keeps the intrigue boiling as Alex tries to stop the remarkably evil Herod Sayles from murdering Britain’s schoolchildren through biological warfare. What if James Bond had started spying as a teenager? This thriller pits 14-year-old Alex Rider against a mad billionaire industrialist.

Stormbreaker book