Flash Fire

4.         Flash Fire

Citation: Cooney, C.B. (1995). Flash Fire. Scholastic, Inc.

Annotation: Trapped on a mountain being consumed by fire without any adults, five children discover they need only trust themselves and each other to make it down alive.

Nomination: Accept.   

Cooney’s Flash Fire is a wonderful adventure novel providing teens readers with a thrilling, realistic story filled with twists and turns.  While Cooney could have easily taken the “easy” way out, she tells the story realistically to her readers and doesn’t sugarcoat the dangers her characters face.  You spend time getting to know each character, and the story is told from their point of view. Surprisingly (though impressively) at the end of the story, two of the characters perish.  Cooney leaves the reader wondering until the last minute if those characters will survive and the reader feels the pain of that loss, just as they would feel in real life.  Cooney is unique in that she could have easily written a way for these characters to survive, but it would have not been realistic to the situation or the danger.  Cooney doesn’t patronize her readers by giving them false hope or a fantastical way of life. Many of the supporting characters of the adults are foolish and oblivious to their children, except for the one that is from the neighborhood and only recently an adult, further appealing to the teen reader and providing additional ways for the reader to relate to the story.

Genre: Adventure