Akron Public Library

A shipwreck strands a family headed for the new world with nothing but the ship's supplies and each other on a desert isle. Through hard work and knowledge of the natural world, they are able to not just survive, but thrive on the island. There is no better adventure in the natural world survival story.

Martel's novel tells the story of Pi--short for Piscine--an unusual boy raised in a zoo in India. Pi's father decides to move the family to live in Canada and sell the animals to the great zoos of America. The ship taking them across the Pacific sinks and Pi finds himself the sole human survivor on a lifeboat with a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra with a broken leg and Bengal tiger called Richard Parker. Life of Pi brings together many themes including...

On one level a simple adventure story. The main character is ship-wrecked on an island. The novel also raises profound questions about moral and spiritual values, society, and man's abiding acquisitiveness.

Fifteen-year-old Jessie and the other rebellious teenage members of a wilderness survival school team abandon their adult leader, hijack his boats, and try to run the dangerous white water at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

It began for our narrator forty years ago when the family lodger stole their car and committed suicide in it, stirring up ancient powers best left undisturbed. Dark creatures from beyond the world are on the loose, and it will take everything our narrator has just to stay alive: there is primal horror here, and menace unleashed-- within his family and from the forces that have gathered to destroy it. His only defense is three women on a farm at the...

Dr. Ben Payne and writer Ashley Knox are the only passengers aboard a small plane they chartered in a snowstorm to get them home. The plane crashes in the Utah mountains unbeknownst to anyone. Ben and Ashley survive, but the pilot is killed. Although injured, they realize that their only hope for rescue is to make it down the mountain to help.

Paulsen takes the wilderness adventure beyond self-preservation & makes teen Brian responsible for saving someone else. Because of his success surviving alone in the wilderness for fifty-four days, fifteen-year-old Brian, profoundly changed by his time in the wild, is asked to undergo a similar experience to help scientists learn more about the psychology of survival. "We want you to do it again." These words, spoken to Brian Robeson, will change...

"Bea's five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment...

Tess, an aspiring seamstress, can't believe her good luck when she meets and is hired by famous designer Lady Lucile Duff Gordon to be a personal maid on the Titanic. On board, Tess catches the eye of two men, one a roughly-hewn but kind sailor and the other an enigmatic Chicago millionaire. Then, on the fourth night, disaster strikes. Amidst the chaos and desperate urging of two very different suitors, Tess is one of the last people allowed on a...

Can humanity survive on a new world? On Eos, the last survivors of the Long Winter face their greatest challenge yet--and race to unravel the deepest secrets of the grid. The last survivors of the human race escaped a ruined Earth. Their new homeworld--Eos--seemed perfect at first. Warm. Hospitable. Safe from the grid. But everything isn't as it seems. The first colony of settlers--from the Carthage--have disappeared. Their settlement is still there,...