Roxanne Smolen

Alien Jungle Roxanne Smolen

When the Jungle Fights BackThe Colonial Scouts are an elite group of explorers who seek out habitable planets for the Colonial Expansion Board. They travel via programmable wormholes.
Trace, a new Scout, wants desperately to prove himself to both the Board and to his girlfriend. But when he leads a rescue party to a failing colony, everything goes against him.
His estranged father turns out to be the leader of the settlement. The colonists think he is inept because he is a teenager. And his disgruntled teammates believe he was named team leader because of his dad. He can tell no one about his secret mission to save only fifteen of the seventy people.
Will he follow orders and leave the colonists to die? Or will he find a way to save them all?
Alien Jungle is a Young Adult novel, but one a reader of any age will enjoy. -- Janet Franks Little, Author, Worth Her Weight
Gripping! -- Darryl Pinder
The best one yet. - Elsanna Reed
Character Sketch:
Trace Hanson is the only child of a wealthy and influential landowner. His mother, a biologist, was lighthearted and loving and kept his brusque, domineering father in line. When Trace was fourteen, his mother contracted Maramus Disease, a rare, disfiguring cancer. While his father toured the galaxy on a fund-raising mission, Trace struggled to care for his mother. Watching her die was devastating. Worse, when his father returned home, he never mentioned her. Instead, he began hosting gala events designed to find Trace a suitable spouse. At sixteen, Trace left home and found a job as an off-loader for a galactic shipping firm. While on leave on a distant world, he stumbled across a man assaulting a girl in an alley and stepped in to save her. The man turned out to be a local politician who, trying to salvage his political career, claimed Trace had robbed him. The girl settled out of court and wouldn't corroborate Trace's story. Trace was sent to a penal colony. But when the courts found out he was underage, they pulled him out of the colony and sent him to the Colonial Scouts.