World of Adventure 8 – Captive!

Gary Paulsen's Captive is a World of Adventure thriller for 10 year olds in which four boys from the same class are taken hostage and have to get themselves out.

What happens

Roman Sanchez sits at the back pretending to be asleep. He's big and quiet and everyone assumes he's tough. Then two men in ski masks walk into the classroom with guns and march the whole class onto a school bus.

The kidnappers want three million dollars and a plane. Four boys get split off from the rest. There's Roman, and Woody (the smallest, known as the Worm, with a photographic memory). There's Mitch, who could talk his way out of anything. And there's Jeff, the football captain, who thinks Roman is a coward.

From there it's all about survival. They're locked in the back of a delivery truck. They leave a secret message on a petrol station toilet wall. They escape, get lost in the mountains and try to work out who they can trust.

It moves FAST. The chapters are short and almost every one ends with something going wrong. Just when you think they've found help, they haven't (no spoilers on how!).

The best part is watching four boys who don't much like each other work out that they need each other. Jeff spends half the book squaring up to Roman. Woody's brains turn out to matter just as much as anyone's muscles.

This one is worth a proper look before you hand it over. The kidnappers point guns at the class and toss a hand grenade in the air. A delivery driver is left bleeding on the ground. One of the men slaps Woody hard enough to give him a nosebleed, and Roman gets kicked in the ribs. We also learn Roman's dad, a police officer, was killed the year before (that's backstory, not a spoiler).

The boys read older than the shelf too, with a football team and a student council. If your reader is a worrier, or danger at school would stay with them at bedtime, it's probably one to save for later. If they love an edge-of-the-seat escape story and don't mind proper baddies, they'll race through it in a sitting.

What to read next

For another Paulsen adventure about a boy who notices what the grown-ups don't, try Skydive, where thirteen-year-old Jesse helps out at an airfield and one of the pilots gets oddly jumpy about a girl with a camera.