Leave No Trace

Mejia, Mindy. Leave No Trace. New York: Holt 2018. Print

First Sentences:

By the time the boy in ward four attacked me, I'd already nicknamed him The Lost One in my head.

He'd been admitted a week ago, transferred from police to orderlies while dozens of reporters swarmed the entrance, overwhelming security in their struggle to get a clear shot of our newest, involuntary patient...The boy who came back from the dead.

Description:

Mindy Mejia's Leave No Trace begins with the startling reappearance of a teenage boy who had been missing for ten years along with his father during a camping trip in the forests of  Minnesota. Due to to the boy's violent behavior and refusal to talk, Lucas is involuntarily placed in a psychiatric facility where he is completely unmanageable. He eventually falls under the observation of the novel's narrator, Maya Stark, a lowly assistant language therapist. 

And now, after two weeks of silent violence and disregard for every human around him, he'd decided to talk. To me.

Slowly, the story of "The Lost One" unfolds. And what Lucas reveals to Maya is the story of parents, dreams, and lives gone askew. Maya, too, has suffered her own familial hardships that include the unexpected disappearance of her own mother. Maya identifies with the pain Lucas feels locked up in the psychiatric facility away from his woods. To get him released or to help him escape seem remote, yet tempting goals.

So who is this boy? Why did he go missing? Where has he (and possibly his father) been for ten years and what were their plans? Questions abound on every page as Maya grows more and more involved in Lucas' case. She researches other historical instances where people voluntarily to disappear and go missing, looking for similarities in their motivations that might be similar to Lucas and his situation, along with any answers to help him find peace.

That's you get from me to avoid spoiling the rest of the totally engrossing story. Lucas and Maya are incredibly well-drawn human characters struggling with their inner thoughts and drives. Their stories are fascinating as are their hopes for the future, whatever that might be. It's a spell-binding tale well-written and executed by author Mejia. 

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Rock, Peter. My Abandonment.   

A teenage girl and her father suffering from PTSD live off the grid in an urban forest until discovered and forced to rejoin the world. Breath-taking writing, characters, and plot. Confusingly, in 2018 this novel was made into a movie called Leave No Trace, and although both the book and movie with the same name focus on people living off the grid, the plots are very different.