Others See Us
William Sleator
Puffin
Fiction, YA Fantasy
****
DESCRIPTION: Vacationing at his grandmother's beachfront estate for the summer, sixteen-year-old Jared has an accident. His bike's brakes fail, sending him tumbling into a local swamp that reeks with toxic waste. He comes out none the worse for wear, after a few showers, but soon discovers that the spill has given him the ability to read minds. The annual family get-together is about to become more exciting than he ever imagined, as dark secrets are revealed and ulterior motives become clear before his developing powers. Soon, Jared is caught in power struggles in the confines of another's mind, as he finds out that he is not the first to discover the powers of the swamp's strange waters.
REVIEW: I found it for two bucks at the Book Warehouse discount bookstore, and I definitely got my money's worth out of it. It's a nicely paranoid story, where nobody doesn't have a secret and a sociopathic relative vies for power with the matriarchal Grandma. Quick, interesting, and suspenseful.
You might also enjoy:
The Animorphs series (K. A. Applegate, YA Fiction - Granted animal-morphing abilities, human children fight parasitic aliens)
Wolf Rider (Avi, YA Fiction - A boy receives a phone call from a man who confesses to a murder that hasn't happened)
Something Wicked This Way Comes (Ray Bradbury, YA Fiction - Two small-town boys find a terrible secret behind a traveling October carnival)
The X-Files: Fight the Future (Chris Carter with Elizabeth Hand, Fiction - Two FBI agents investigate a government conspiracy involving aliens on Earth)
Things Not Seen (Andrew Clements, YA Fiction - A boy wakes up one morning and discovers that he's invisible)
The Supernaturalist (Eoin Colfer, YA Fiction - A near-death experience grants a boy the ability to see invisible creatures)
The Stoneheart trilogy (Charlie Fletcher, YA Fiction - An act of angry vandalism plunges a boy into the unseen war between London's statues and gargoyles)
Coraline (Neil Gaiman, YA Fiction - A girl finds a doorway to an a strange and dangerous world)
Neverwhere (Neil Gaiman, Fiction - A London man helps a wounded street girl and finds himself pulled into the surreal realm of LondonBelow)
The Shadow Children sequence (Margaret Peterson Haddix, YA Fiction - In a dystopian future dominated by cruel laws and corruption, an illegal third child decides to fight back)
Magic or Madness (Justine Larabalestier, YA Fiction - Abandoned by an insane mother, a teen goes to live with her grandma and learns the dark family secret behind her mom's breakdown)
The Watchers series (Peter Lerangis, YA Fiction - An anthology about ordinary children in extrordinarily strange situations)
The Visitors trilogy (Rodman Philbrick and Lynn Harnett, YA Fiction - After a UFO crash-lands in the hills, townsfolk start acting strangely)
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