Yanked!

Yanked! tells an exciting story about teenagers from our time confronted with difficult challenges. Not only do they have to deal with a otherworldly situation (literally), but they also have to cope with people from the past and future who have very different views on life: a boy from the past who is a violent, dishonest fellow who is willing to trade people for property, and a robot from the future that can't deal with anything outside its normal experience. How the heroes from our time manage to achieve their goals in spite of these obstacles makes a fine tale.

Sharon and Jason are two ordinary teens from New York City. Along with a group of kids from the past, and the near future, they are sent to 2339 to combat an alien menace threatening to destroy an Earth that is now made up completely of pacifists. Now, Sharon and Jason must reach within themselves to find the courage to be heroes and save the humanity of the future. This was a page-turner, edge-of-your-seat science fiction thriller that also gives you a lot to think about. Highly reccomended.

I bought this book because I enjoyed Nancy Kress' "Beggars" series. This book was very disappointing to me, just because nothing had warned me that it was a book for young adults - which was immediately evident once I started reading it. I felt like I was back in high school. That said, I think it is well-written for its audience, an interesting story, with good characters and good values.

A comic book trope that I always despised was used sporadically in the 1960s. Hal Jordan, Green Lantern, would periodically get shanghaied to the future by a bunch of ineffectual dweebs who didn't have any heroes of their own. They assigned him a new secret ID ("Pol Manning"), had him fight the menace of the issue, then wiped his memory before they sent him packing.The OUT OF TIME series uses a similar gimmick: Teenagers from various centuries get yanked to the future and issued marching orders against crypic aliens. Unlike the old GL comics, they remember who they are while in the future; like GL, they get their memories erased before going home.The book at hand is better written than the comic books (no big surprise). The characters are reasonably interesting, if a bit basic, and they interact well. This is science fiction in a fairly Hamiltonian way -- very little discussion of technology, just of the results, but a heavy emphasis on color and imagery and exotic environments.My two biggest quibbles:1. The cover sucks, and so does the cover to volume two. The titles and blurbs are hard to read and the photo-illustration is ugly.2. The book itself reads like it escaped from the Young Adult section -- low page-count, youthful protagonists, clean language, empahsis on consensus-building and lessons learned, etc. I don't particularly mind the approach, but it comes as a surprise, since there's nothing on the book to indicate it is intended for other than an adult audience.

Nancy Kress jump starts this series. Like the idea of real today kids being pulled into this action adventure. I have ordered both Tiger in the Sky by Sheila Finch and The Game of Worlds by Roger MacBride Allen. I hope they handle their parts of the series as well as Nancy Kress.