Bearing Northeast – Henry Melton

©2011 Wire Rim Books, Hutto, Texas

This year, Henry Melton has already been busy. Two books have already been released. The first is this edition in the Small Towns, Big Ideas series.

In this episode, Elizabeth (Biz) and Seth are trying to keep life together after losing their parents. They’ve even developed rules to keep them together—with Biz as the guardian of her minor brother Seth. Upon making final arrangements to sell the summer place in Crescent City, California and move back to the house in Fresno, something falls from the sky and damages a tree. That something turns out to be a canister with a semi-broken GPS device inside.

Seth convinces Biz to take a road trip to discover the origin of the device (which has a Northeasterly Bearing displayed) when she gets down-sized at her job. The cross-country adventure takes them through Yellowstone, by the Great Lakes, and on into Canada. The small town involved in this story is actually Churchill Falls, Labrador, Canada. It is a small village where electricity is produced for much of southeastern Canada and even northeastern United States. The local science club is trying to harness some of this energy to do something new.

This one reads like a travelogue, an adventure story, a spy novel, and a Twitter conversation between Seth and his on-line buddies.

The big drawback to this story lies in the occasional tedium that accompanies the space-age stories—even if America’s space program seems to be grinding to a halt in the same year that the story is published. All in all, Melton has shown himself well once again, and his debut of new series The PROJECT Saga is just around the corner (with review in a matter of weeks), so Bearing Northeast earns another four out of five reading glasses.

—Benjamin Potter, July 26, 2011

 

[This book was provided for review by Wire Rim Books of Hutto, Texas. Opinions are my own.]