Three Damsels in Distress

Do they have the wits and willpower to survive? Will they be rescued or will they need to fight their way out by themselves?

     Double Identity by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Just before her thirteenth birthday, Elizabeth is dropped off at the home of an aunt she has never met by her distraught parents.  In the morning she learns she’s no longer in Pennsylvania, but Illinois, and she doesn’t know why.  She also doesn’t know why the townspeople she meets are so shocked by her appearance, or why her father mails her a box with four birth certificates for her with four different names and two stacks of hundred-dollar bills.  She starts to wonder who she really is.  Soon the answers start coming in rapid succession, each more shocking than the last, in this thrilling page-turner.  A read-alike for this is: Where It Stops Nobody Knows  by Amy Ehrlich.  

     The White Darkness : a Novel  by Geraldine McCaughrean

Fourteen-year-old Symone struggles to survive in the coldest desert on earth, Antarctica.  Adding to her trials are her traveling companions: a fanatic “uncle” obsessed with finding an entrance to the hollow earth and two confidence men.  With friends like these, it’s no wonder that she relies on the companion of her imagination, Captain Lawrence Oates, who died on Scott’s expedition to the South Pole in 1912, for sound guidance.  This is a ripping good adventure and survival story that spooks the reader with enough chills to simulate the Antarctic cold.

     Three Days  by Donna Jo Napoli

What do you do when your dream vacation turns into a nightmare?  It’s bad enough to be right beside your father when he dies at the wheel of a car speeding through the Italian countryside, but it’s even worse when your “rescuers,” who don’t speak any English take you away to a remote house in the county and lock you up.  Eleven-year-old Jackie must figure out what they want and why they took her captive.