What to Read After Harry Potter

[Denise]

No: HPFGUIDX 959

Monday September 4 8:01 AM ET
What to Read After Harry Potter 

By Ellen Freilich 

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A month after the release of J.K. Rowling's ``Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,'' any Potter fan worth his salt has finished the 734-page book, an international publishing phenomenon and the fourth volume about the plucky young wizard's apprentice. 

So what can a youthful book-lover read in August? 

Plenty, it turns out. Books about nature and summer itself seem particularly apt for the season. But the key element of a good summer book is for the reader be drawn in so completely that he doesn't want to come up for air until the last page is finished. 

One such tale is Gary Blackwood's ``The Shakespeare Stealer'' (Puffin Books). Set in Elizabethan England, the Shakespeare stealer is a young apprentice, Widge, who is ordered by his master, an angry former member of Shakespeare's acting company, to sneak into the Globe Theater and copy down the words of ''Hamlet'' so it can be performed by his rival acting company. 

In the process of carrying out his master's orders, Widge is drawn into the company of the Globe players, who begin to train him as an actor and treat him as a friend. Widge's predicament of being charged to steal from his newfound friends keeps the reader in suspense while giving us a taste of what it might have been like to work at the Globe with the Bard himself present. 

``Mary, Bloody Mary'' by Carolyn Meyer (Gulliver Books, Harcourt, Brace & Company) is set in a slightly earlier historical period, during the reign of King Henry VIII. Mary ascended to the throne of England six years after her father's death, and after her death she was succeeded by her younger sister, Elizabeth. 

Mary, Mayans And Monday 

History has accorded Mary an unflattering nickname, but this book is most sympathetic to a young girl and woman who was treated by her father, Henry VIII, as nothing more than a high-priced piece of property and a pawn in the king's bitter fight with her mother, Catherine of Aragon. 

A Mayan city in the 9th century provides the setting for Chris Eboch's ``The Well of Sacrifice'' (Clarion Books). Eveningstar Macaw lives in a Mayan city that appears prosperous until its king dies and is succeeded by the High Priest. The priest orders the sacrifice of Eveningstar's beloved brother, along with many other young male nobles. 

Eveningstar's attempt to rescue her brother puts her own life in jeopardy and she must escape the city to save her life and rescue her family. This fast-paced tale, narrated by its heroine, is rich with details of 9th-century Mayan life. 

Eleven-year-old Monday de Groot is the protagonist of Sharon Dennis Wyeth's ``Once on This River'' (Knopf), set in colonial New York. Monday has known nothing of slavery all her life until she leaves the safety of Madagascar and sets sail with her mother for America, where her mother hopes to rescue Monday's uncle, a free man who has been illegally enslaved by a wealthy Dutch family in New York. 

Wyeth repopulates downtown New York with the people who inhabited the city in the mid-1700s, including a community of free blacks who lived there at the same time enslaved Africans were being sold at a place called the Meal Market. 

Pioneers, Settlers And Soldiers 

Joseph Bruchac's ``Sacajawea'' (Silver Whistle/Harcourt Inc.) is set half a century later, in the early 1800s, during the carefully recorded expedition of Lewis and Clark, two explorers who were authorized by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the land from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. 

The story is told from alternating points of view -- the diaries of William Clark and the fictionalized voice of a young Shoshone woman, Sacajawea, who at age 16 served as translator, peacemaker, caretaker and guide for Lewis and Clark on their historic explorations. 

In 1870, on the flat, open prairie of America, the two pioneer sisters of Frances Arrington's ``Bluestem'' (Philomel Books) must survive without their parents when, with their father away, their mother falls strangely silent, unable to cope with the loneliness of the prairie and the loss of her baby during the winter. 

Although frightened, 9-year-old Jessie and 11-year-old Polly manage to ward off the intrusions of an unsympathetic neighboring family who would be happy to grab their land, and the girls survive until, at last, their father returns. ''Bluestem'' effectively portrays both the emptiness and the beauty of the prairie. 

In Sara Harrell Banks' ``Abraham's Battle: A Novel of Gettysburg'' (Atheneum Books for Young Readers), Abraham Small, a free black man and the caretaker of a Gettysburg estate, meets Lamar Cooper, a poor, white Confederate soldier who has never known a slave, before the historic battle ensues. 

Their paths cross during the battle, Abraham now a member of a Union ambulance corps and Lamar a critically wounded soldier. It's a juncture that forces Abraham, and the readers of this novel, to discern when people's common humanity supersedes their differences. 

Marisa, a Polish Jew whose blond hair and blue eyes allow her to pass as a Christian, is the heroine of Carol Matas' ``In My Enemy's House'' (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers). With her family either scattered or dead, Marisa makes her way to Germany, hoping to survive the war as a Polish worker. There she finds work in the household of a high-ranking Nazi and is befriended by his daughter, all as she hides in plain sight in her enemy's house. 



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