The Golden Compass: His Dark Materials, Book 1 (by Philip Pullman)

Enter a parallel world, dark and cold, with daemons, boat-dwelling gypsies, armored bears, and a street child with a strange destiny. Children, even Lyra's best friend Roger, start disappearing, victims of mysterious kidnappers called Gobblers. Lyra is given a magical instrument that tells the future and is sent off with the glamorous Mrs. Coulter. When she learns that Mrs. Coulter runs the Gobblers, she escapes, touching off a race to save the kidnapped children. With the help of the Gyptians, a boat-dwelling people, and Iorek Byrnison, a talking, warrior polar bear, she travels to the Arctic, where she finds that the children are being subjected to ghastly experiments that separate them from their souls. Meanwhile Iorek battles for control of the warrior bears, and Lyra's uncle, Lord Asriel, prepares to blast a hole between worlds.

Nail-biting suspense grabs readers until they can't shake themselves loose from this strange world -- familiar, but definitely not the Earth we know. The magical quality of Lyra's world sets readers' imaginations soaring. This place is so convincingly portrayed that the experiments performed on the children seem as gruesome to the reader as to Lyra. Readers soon accept her world, and they especially love this smart, rowdy heroine. Forget about sweet, honest girls -- this scrappy street fighter uses all her wits to outfox the villains, and discovers mystical talents that she never knew she had.

For avid readers, fantasy buffs, and kids who are outgrowing children's fantasies, this is a great treasure. As this feisty little heroine battles the Gobblers, and follows a mystical device to a universe-altering confrontation in the Arctic, your tweens and teens will be gripping this book with white knuckles long past lights-out. Even reluctant readers may get hooked if you begin by reading it aloud. Since it ends in a true cliff-hanger, the next stop is The Subtle Knife.