I never read much fiction for young adults, or teens as we used to be called when not being called something less savoury. Even when I was technically age-appropriate for that genre it was never something I was particularly interested in. First of all, the topics never seemed that interesting – it was mostly young love and high-school garbage that seemed to be lived by people from another planet.
Nobody I knew talked like or acted like the people in these books, or even more to the point, cared about the things these characters seemed to think mattered. How people could live in our world and be so clueless as to what was going on around them socially and politically was beyond me. Little did I know, until I was much older, that I was a freak - but that's another story.
At the time, as far as I was concerned, it just meant that nobody except adults were writing anything that interested me. It was either that or reading fantasy stories — like the books of Alan Gardner or Susan Cooper — written for children. There seemed to be no middle ground, nothing in between. Well, thirty years too late I've finally stumbled on a couple of books that would have fit the bill perfectly.
Land Of The Mammoths and Pirates, Bats, and Dragons by Mike Davis, published by Perceval Press, are giant strides in the right direction of writing books for a youth audience that have more on their minds than what they're going to wear to the prom. That they are both subtitled "A Science Adventure" is the first clue that they are not your standard youth fare, and reading them only confirms it.
Both stories feature three young adults who have exceptional skills, but not outside the realm of reason. In other words, while they are intelligent and gifted in their fields of study their abilities don't make them unrecognizable as teenagers. They still have all the characteristics of teenagers - the cock-sure attitude that they know what they are doing and no one else does; convinced of their immortality; and suffering from foot in mouth disease.
Jack and Connor are Irish Americans who live in Ireland, while Julia is a New Yorker and proud of it. In both novels the three protagonists travel to parts of the world that are little known to people of any age in our society: Greenland in book one, and the Arab island Socotra in the Arabian Sea, at the mouth of the Indian Ocean off the coast of Yemen, for book two.
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