Abstract
This is a summary guide to 51 books of Richmond Robin Readers, which seem to be targeted at teenage learners of English, judging from the ages of the protagonists: 12 or 13 to 19 years old in accordance with the levels from 1 (300 headwords) to 6 (1800 headwords). The characteristics of this series are as follows: 1) A fifth of the stories are set in Australia whose indigenous animals such as crocodiles and kangaroos are effectively used in Jane Bowring's Cousins and Crocodiles and James Roy's Broken Wing. 2) Half of the books are about the teen protagonists fighting against adult criminals, mainly robbers. Although some of them are quite humorous like Denise Kirby's Black Night, others are unexpectedly serious like Pauline O'Carolan's Ride for Your Life and Deadly Holiday. A unique writer, Ms. O'Carolan prefers describing evil doings of abnormal people like an arsonist, a stalker and even a serial killer. 3) Many of the stories are based on the protagonists' newly found leisure activities such as skiing, scuba diving, horse riding, orienteering, ballooning, yachting, and rafting, out of which powerful stories like Ms. Kirby's Hot Air and Sue Murray's Wild Water were born. Since those recreational experiences are not so hard to be accessible to teenagers, they will probably enjoy reading such rather approachable adventures.
Other recommended books you cannot miss in this series are Sue Murray's CHOIR Boy (a good-looking boy robot causes a lot of trouble at school), Sam Bowring's In Sarah's Dreams (a girl fights back the bully in her dreams), Philip Voysey's The Rainbow Girl (an outcast, hunchback girl kills a monster for her village), and Denise Kirby's What Happened at Seacliffe (through the visit to her rich cousins in England, an Australian female student gets to know that her ancestor was robbed of his inheritance and forcibly sent to the faraway land as a criminal most probably by his own brother).
