Alone (Megan E. Freeman)

Alone
Megan E. Freeman
Aladdin
Fiction, MG Action/Thriller
**** (Good)

DESCRIPTION: When twelve-year-old Maddie wanted to throw a secret sleepover with her friends in her grandparents' empty apartment, she told a little white lie to her separated parents, telling each she'd be spending the weekend with the other. She's not a bad kid or prone to lying, and it's not like she doesn't like her parents or the new stepfamilies. It just feels good to get out from under her responsibilities and parental scrutiny once in a while, to just hang with friends and watch movies and stay up late on the weekend. Even when her friends had to cancel on her, Maddie decided to go on her own anyway. What could possibly go wrong?
The next day, everyone in her Colorado town is gone.
Sometime after midnight, a vague national threat - she never did get the details, having mostly slept through it - saw everyone evacuated in a rush, their cell phones and belongings left behind. Worse, Maddie realizes that both her parents think she's with the other family... and without cell phones, if they got separated, there's no way for them to realize she's not there. Now she's alone, save her neighbors' Rottweiler George. As one day becomes one week becomes months, Maddie realizes she doesn't know how long she'll have to survive before help comes. Worse, she doesn't even know if help is coming at all.

REVIEW: Alone is a decent, sometimes dark little thriller of survival in an abandoned American suburb. There are hints of things being wrong from the start, convoys of military vehicles passing through towns and checkpoints that her parents see more as a hassle than a warning, but like many kids, Maddie can't bring herself to bother about adult things like politics or nebulous threats to "national freedom". She has more important things to worry about, like dealing with a separated family and hanging out with friends and figuring out what she wants to be when she grows up, which still seems so far away it's nearly impossible to imagine. Waking to find herself all alone, she has to do some growing up pretty quickly, even though she initially believes that her isolation is bound to be temporary; Mom and Dad will surely move heaven and earth and even strongarm the military to come find her once they realize she's gone. It soon becomes apparent that she really is on her own, that she really could be lost for good - that she really could die here and nobody would know what happened to her. Still, even as Maddie faces internal crises of will and failures of hope, she digs in and pulls herself through, making a few mistakes but generally being smart enough to learn from them. The tale moves fairly well, acquiring an almost poetic quality (literally poetic towards the end, as her isolation leads her to a new appreciation for poetry in her trips to the abandoned town library) on its way to a slightly rushed but reasonably satisfactory ending.

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