•    2000: Junior Library Guild selection

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When I set out to select a theme for the third collection of young adult stories to follow Night Terrors and Trapped!, I dug deep into my reservoir of personal horrors and came up with with that particular nightmare. My stomach lurched at the memory, and I could feel the accelerated pounding of my heart in my fingertips.

The choice was made--this anthology would be titled On the Edge.

My irrational fear of heights had a strong effect upon my childhood and adolescence. I couldn't force myself to climb the ladderlike branches of our backyard oak tree, and so was automatically excluded from the group of neighborhood children who scampered like monkeys up to my brother's leaf-shrouded tree house. On ski vacation I was condemned to forever to the bunny slope, from which I watched my adventurous classmates go soaring off the chairlift, and although I was quite a good swimmer, I wouldn't join the swim team because competition would have required diving off the edge of the pool. Instead, I directed my energies toward composing poetry, writing articles for youth publications, and editing the school paper. My life career was shaped less by my strengths than my weakness.

Yet, although so much of my own young was spent on the edge of social activities and psychological challenges, I was nevertheless surprised when the majority of the award-winning writers from whom I solicited stories for this anthology interpreted the term "on the edge" in ways more emotional than physical. I had somehow expected to be flooded with tales about young heroes and heroines teetering on the edges and cliffs, inching their way along window edges, or plunging in barrels over the edge of Niagara Falls. Instead, the only stories that involve danger and physically falling were one about a boy in Hawaii trying to psych himself up for a dive from a fifty-foot ledge, and another about a soloist ballerina struggling to perform a dangerous routine on a stage smeared with Vaseline.

The majority of the writers whose stories appear on these pages have interpreted "on the edge" in ways I didn't anticipate.

Here you meet Stevie, whose suicide attempt has placed her on the edge of a group of patients in a mental institution; Jeremy, who performs a tenuous balancing act between the physical world and the virtual world of the Internet; and Rachel, who exists on the edge of a family that rotates around the histrionics of her attention-hungry older sister.

But there are humorous stories here as well. Who can help smiling with empathy at the plight of love-struck Chris, on the edge of expressing his devotion to a girl of his dreams when his face erupts overnight with a volcanic zit? Or sympathizing with poor nerdy Donny, on the edge of being massacred by a 240-pound linebacker know as "Doughnut," with nothing with which to defend himself except a pan of "Liathuanian pig brains"!

The most unusual story in this collection is also the most tragic, which is why I have chosen to place it at the end. Once readers have traveled the length of the elephant trench with a seventeen-year-old May Moua as she flees the Phaet Lao portal with her baby in her arms, they will want to call it a night-and sleep with the light on.

You are poised On the Edge of an extraordinary reading adventure.

Turn the first page and let the free fall begin!

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