Long Live the Queen

As her senior year winds to a close, Meg is having a perfectly ordinary day at school (as ordinary as it gets with two Secret Service agents tailing her) that ends with a violent abduction arranged by terrorists. Held captive and brutalized, then left chained in an abandoned mine shaft, Meg escapes by resorting to barely conceivable heroics. Her ordeal seems to have only begun, however, as she now faces the aftermath: a grueling physical recovery that will never be complete; emotional damage from her mother's absolute refusal to deal with her kidnappers; her pervasive sense of endangerment. With this entry White proves herself a master of action and adventure fiction; readers will want to plunge immediately into the next volume, Long May She Reign , to check in on Meg's progress. And there's good news, too—White plans a fifth Meg Powers novel, although she warns that it might not be told from Meg's point of view. Ages 12–up. (Aug.)