Across the Desert (Dusti Bowling)

Across the Desert
Dusti Bowling
Little, Brown Books
Fiction, MG Adventure
****+ (Good/Great)

DESCRIPTION: Two years ago, Jolene's life may not have been perfect, but it was worlds better than the one she's living now. The car crash completely upended her life - but not in the way one might expect. It was when her mother came home from the hospital with a prescription for pain pills... a prescription that became an oxycodone addiction, though Jolene doesn't want to use that word. Now Mom spends most of her time in bed and hardly seems to notice her own daughter, barely managing a grocery run now and again. One of Jolene's few escapes is in the library, and she was there, using the computer to watch her favorite livestream - "Addie Earhart", a girl just about her age who flies an ultralight solo all around the Arizona desert having adventures - that disaster strikes again. Addie's ultralight goes down in the middle of nowhere... and only Jolene was watching, to know that she's in trouble at all.
Jolene tries to get help. She calls the police, she goes to the fire station, she even tries talking to her mother. Nobody believes the half-hysterical twelve-year-old girl, and since it was a livestream there's no record of it online, just a dead channel. But Jolene isn't going to give up on Addie. She's been watching regularly for quite some time, and has even hand-drawn a map of her flights, so she's pretty sure she knows about where the ultralight went down. It's only eighty miles away, and she knows her mother won't even miss her before she gets home. It'll be an adventure, just like the women she's read about, who traveled across the country and around the world all on their own. But there's a big difference between reading about adventures and having one herself, especially when she's a city girl through and through trekking out into the desert for the first time in her life...

REVIEW: Across the Desert starts with a girl already in distress and and puts her through the physical and psychological wringer, celebrating resilience and tenacity even as it shines a spotlight on how terrible it is that she has to be in this situation to begin with: if addiction were easier to treat without so many barriers and hoops to jump through (many of which just can't be jumped through without lots of money and/or lots of luck), if people just plain listened when other people (especially children) cried for help and didn't dismiss them at a glance, Jolene never would've been in the situation she's in, and even though she learns some positive things and discovers her own strengths, the story does not pretend that it's a great thing that she had to go through this at all. One of the first thing she learned after the accident and her mother developed her pill dependency was how impossible it is for anyone to get help, and how she can't trust anyone because they just won't listen to her. Her mother's dependency naturally has knock-on effects for her daughter, especially in school, where her tattered and too-small clothes and other markers of poverty make her a target for mockery and bullying. One of her few outlets is drawing maps, which is why she has a detailed map at hand of the Arizona desert while she watches Addie's livestream. She's about the only regular viewer, and has a semi-regular online correspondence with the girl who seems to embody all the bravery of the adventuresses in history she loves reading about... which makes her the only person who knows something is wrong when Addie ends up livestreaming her own ultralight crash. Even the librarian doesn't believe her, convinced the girl is mistaken, more upset that the library filters let a child see something disturbing than with listening to what she's actually saying. With no better results when she calls authorities or tries to talk to her mother, city girl Jolene decides it's up to her to rescue her internet friend in the wilderness - a job she can't possibly do alone, but which clearly needs doing, and which nobody seems willing to help her with. Even from the start, though, there's more to her decision than just helping Addie, a turning point in her life that's been coming ever since the car crash and her mom's pills sent her own world tumbling out of control. It's a half-step away from actually running away from home, and about as far from simply not caring if she comes back from the desert at all.
Despite her conviction that nobody will help her, Jolene ends up finding a few allies along the way. Most notable is the 17-year-old girl Marty, whom she meets at the Greyhound station and who ends up becoming both protector and friend, though much of the journey still rests on Jolene's successes (and failures). Without Marty, she wouldn't even have gotten on the bus as an unaccompanied minor. Still, Jolene has trouble trusting Marty, especially when the older girl tries to talk her out of her dangerous (and admittedly ill-thought-out and -prepared-for) plan, but soon enough proves her worth and loyalty. Along the way, Jolene does a lot of growing up in a hurry, setting out alone for the first time in her life and learning that the rest of the world doesn't work at all like downtown Phoenix, where gas stations are always open and there's always an outlet to charge a cell phone (and a signal). Much as she tries to draw lessons and comfort from historical lady adventurers and groundbreakers, Jolene is also still a child, an untested city girl, and one burdened by unprocessed traumas (which she describes as the "car crash feeling" that often threatens to overwhelm her, reminding her of those horrible, infinite seconds between realizing their car was going to be hit - and there was nothing she could do about it - and the impact that essentially destroyed her world). Through it all, she manages to find reserves of strength and courage she never realized she had, and perhaps some possibilities for a future she had stopped believing she would ever reach, or even deserved. Most of all, though, she finally learns - and believes - that she is not as alone as she thought, and that sometimes there really are people who care. It all builds up to a harrowing climax in the desert, where Jolene and Marty are put to the ultimate test of how far they've both come.
After this moment, though, there's still more story to tell, as that climax served almost more to prepare Jolene for the ultimate trial of confronting the biggest challenge in her life. I thought this tail end went on just a trifle too long, almost enough to rob the tale of the extra half-star, but ultimately gave it the benefit of the doubt. It was never just a story of one girl finding the spirit of adventure and her own inner strengths, after all, but the tale of a hurt and broken girl who had slipped through society's gaping cracks and had stopped even trying to climb out, who finally discovers reasons to begin fighting back and claiming a future for herself. It does not pull many punches as it deals with the traumas endured by the families of addicts, and how, while society often gives lip service to caring and pretends that there's always a helping hand for those who reach for it, it mostly just seems to ignore the ones most hurt, especially the poor and the young ones, leaving them to fend for themselves.

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