The End of the Wild by Nicole Helget (review)

Eleven-year-old Fern loves the woods that surround her home; there she hunts and forages for food for her family and finds peace to keep alive the memories of her mother and her little brother, who were killed in a car accident. When she learns that the woods are in danger of being claimed by a fracking company for a wastewater pond and both her stepfather and her best friend's father take a job with the the company, Fern struggles to find a way to alert people to the value of preserving the woods. With impressive pacing and precise, lyrical descriptions of the rural Michigan landscape and the diverse characters who make their home there, Helget crafts a remarkably even-handed story of a controversial topic, balancing the need of two fathers to have jobs that pay enough for them to support their families against Fern's fears that the fracking operation will damage the environment. Fern is preternaturally competent, harvesting and cooking wild plants and mushrooms following her mother's recipes (included), but she is emotionally credible, and she is supported by a character we don't often see: a wise, feisty social worker who advocates for the hard-working, responsibility-laden childhood that Fern herself clearly loves. All sides get a fair hearing in the course of a story that canvasses far more than its environmental issue; pair this with Dulemba's A Bird on Water Street to flesh out the middle-school science curriculum.