Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment. Again, Nya confronts impossible moral choices as she fights to find her beloved sister. Flashing and pushing pain into her foes, determined and seemingly fearless Nya catapults through the pages like a super-charged action figure, but her first-person narration reveals inner conflict when forced to use her healing powers to injure and kill. Deperate to find Tali and protect the Takers, Nya orchestrates a hair-raising plot to demolish the Duke's pain experiments. While fleeing Geveg, Nya's kidnapped by bounty hunters and transported to Baseer, where she escapes, allies with Baseeri underground fighters and discovers their leader is her uncle, making her half Baseeri. Takers heal by transferring human pain into 'pynvium,' but Nya shifts pain from one person to another, enabling her to use pain as a weapon. Continuing where The Shifter (2009) ended, book two of The Healing Wars series finds 15-year-old Nya, her sister Tali and other Takers hiding in Geveg from the invading Duke of Baseer, who plans to use them in his mysterious pain experiments.

Blue Fire by Janice Hardy