STARTED & FINISHED:

Salisbury, Graham. (2007). Night of the howling dogs. New York: Wendy Lamb/Random House.

[What a surprisingly quick read. It helped that it was a TOTAL page-turner! I didn't even realize that I was a fan of "survival" lit... I'm reviewing it for ACL, so I'll put up the full review here when I've written it. Here's the review [I submitted it to go on the Distinguished list:

In Hilo, Hawaii, in the winter of 1975, a small troop of boy scouts set out to explore a remote, and little explored, volcanic rock beach. Things start out pretty typical for the camping group, but after a night of traditional Hawaiian spirit tales around the campfire, told by some older men on a fishing trip, and the foreshadowing of Dylan, our narrator, hearing a couple of dogs howling in the middle of the night, all hell breaks loose for the scouting troop. A harrowing natural disaster causes the teenage boys to muster up every bit of courage and stamina they have in them in order to save themselves and help the other scouts. Based on a true story, this deftly paced page-turner is the horrible, yet empowering tale of how kids can come together calmly in a moment of extreme crisis in order to survive even the most extreme situations. For fans, especially boys, of survival fiction, this fictional account of an earthquake and subsequent tsunami also includes sharks, swarms of bees, and limited amounts of drinkable water and supplies while contending with broken bones and bloody cuts in the blazing sun, all taking place on an unstable dried lava terrain that threatens to shatter with each step. Interwoven is the story of how Dylan and the “bad, troubled kid” who comes along on the scouting trip are avoiding the fact that they have had a tense, previous encounter with each other. Also included is an Author’s Note, detailing how the author’s cousin was one of the scouts involved in the actual event and how they visited the site of the tragedy a few years after the fact. This is an exciting, quick read that has the potential to fly off the shelves.]

*