Alone in the Woods by Rebecca Behrens (review)

Friendships often diverge in middle school, but it’s a whole other thing entirely when a friendship fail becomes the force that threatens your very life, which is what happens when full-steam-ahead Alex and less-than-socially-adept Joss, once inseparable besties, are forced together in the annual two-family cabin vacation in the Wisconsin northwoods. It takes only a few seconds of missteps to separate Joss and Alex from their group on a tubing expedition, and they’re now trekking on a rough forest path that they hope will lead to their families, growing hungrier, thirstier, colder, and more bug-bitten by the hour, until they’re hopelessly lost, moving in circles and wallowing in their grievances. Joss carries the bulk of the narration and consequently captures reader sympathy early on. However, Alex may be rougher around the edges but she’s really guilty of little more than maturing faster than Joss, a realization at which Joss herself, as well as readers, finally arrive. Behrens plays fair with both the friendship drama and the survival story, and each protagonist’s voice is astute and true to her own perspective. On being lost in the woods, Joss observes, “I don’t think I ever understood all those ominous fairy tales about kids being lost in the forest until I realized I’d become one of those kids,” and on the friends’ break-up, Alex comments, “We’d gone from being two peas in a pod to two peas in a low-key food fight.” In the northwoods or the school hallway, most readers will feel they’ve been there.