"The Servant" and "The Wall" Driving down from her Lebanese mountain village, 15-year-old Faten catches her first glimpse of the wide Mediterranean horizon. A daydream flickers past: "What if she opened the car door and ran towards the sea?" But she is her father's prisoner, on her way to a life of servitude with a wealthy family in Beirut during the civil war. In two new novels - "The Servant," by the prolific Lebanese children's author Fatima Sharafeddine, and "The Wall," by the British novelist William Sutcliffe - teenage protagonists, Faten and Joshua, respectively, pass through boundaries that most people around them would never think to cross, with life-changing results. Their stories will draw in young readers preoccupied with society, challenging parents and their own fears. And for those interested in the Middle East, reading these books provides a glimpse across another barrier, the official state of war that persists between Lebanon and Israel, two neighboring countries whose hills and beaches could be mirror images but that exist largely as dreamscapes in the minds of each other's citizens. Two years after her arrival in Beirut, Faten, the young woman at the center of Sharafeddine's novel, finds herself mostly confined to the family's apartment and spends free moments gazing from a balcony - as if from behind an invisible barrier - at a young neighbor who comes and goes as he pleases. She hatches a daring plan that will take her across many boundaries. Meanwhile, the boundary that Joshua, 13, confronts in "The Wall" is literal: it is the wall that separates his hometown - an Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territory of the West Bank, though this is unstated - from the people on "the other side." One day, chasing a lost ball, Joshua finds a secret passageway. He does what he knows he should not. "Walls are for climbing," he explains, "secret hide-outs are for exploring." As he crawls through the tunnel, he imagines a parallel self walking above ground, "getting closer and closer to the wall, and at any moment simply ghosting through it to the unknown place on the other side." This is a familiar feeling for journalists, particularly in the Middle East, who often feel as if, by passing through walls of class and politics that seem solid to others, they have become invisible, rootless. Though one ends more happily than the other, Faten's and Joshua's journeys wreak more permanent havoc. Sutcliffe - who has visited Palestinian towns and Israeli settlements in the West Bank, and whose book is longlisted for the Guardian children's fiction prize - is at his best when describing the West Bank landscape through the eyes of his curious hero. As Joshua surveys a Palestinian street, his senses overflow. He sees a man in a tracksuit selling cigarettes from a cart, and a woman in a head scarf selling eggs alongside a jumble of "car seats, springs, cogs and axles." He hears "the mournful wail of a solo voice backed by violins" competing with a "speech blaring from the distorted speakers of a badly tuned radio." "The freakishness of this place is only in my head, in its unfamiliarity to me," he observes. These are ordinary people having an ordinary day in what for them is an ordinary town. Yet a short crawl has taken him "farther away from home than I've ever been." Soon some threatening teenagers realize he is from the wrong side of the wall. A young girl saves him, and his ensuing entanglement with her family makes an often suspenseful tale. Joshua's growing awareness of life behind the wall drives him to defy his stepfather - a caricature whose rants are printed in capital letters - to help the family. The girl's father draws a map to his ancestral olive grove - along a road that no longer exists, severed by the wall. Joshua tends it, until disaster strikes. At times, the adventure fits a stereotype, in which the protagonist from a dominant culture encounters poorer, warmer people and learns through them. Joshua, though, comes to realize the harm he has brought to his new friends and, in the end, pays his own price. In Sharafeddine's simply told tale, the drama of civil war takes a back seat to that of young characters straining against rigid expectations. Faten slowly softens toward her employers" bossy elder daughter, who wants to be an artist but submits to an arranged marriage instead. Faten proves bolder. She slips out, dizzied by the transgressive act of going alone to a corner store, to meet her neighbor. He helps her study in secret to fulfill her dream of becoming a nurse. Yet as romance blossoms, she learns he, too, is under pressure to marry an appropriate bride. "It's as if I'm caught in a trap that's impossible to break free from," he tells her. Faten does not wait for him to ride to her rescue; she rescues herself. She, too, faces losses, but ends up driving her own proverbial car. When she finally reaches the sea, she feels the wet sand beneath her feet and begins to run. In her abandon, Faten screams at the top of her lungs. No one hears her. No one sees her. She feels free. Anne Barnard is the Beirut bureau chief for The Times.