INTO THE RAPIDS

Twelve-year-old Addy’s goals change when a prolonged storm washes out the bridge that connects her small Vermont town to the outside world.

The bridge’s loss jeopardizes Addy’s long-held dream of attending the same summer survival camp where her mother and her now-deceased father met when they were her age. To her surprise, her long-shunned classmate Caleb offers to help, which opens the floodgates—not only to a workaround that just might get her to the camp, but to ways of moving past the grief and self-imposed isolation that have mired her and her even more traumatized mom ever since her father died in a flash flood. Braden spins a fairly taut natural disaster tale that sees Addy relying on the survival skills that she’s diligently practiced for camp. Overall, though, the narrative takes on a heavy-handedly therapeutic cast. Along with mentioning the background reading she’s done on trauma since the accident, Addie helps her mom get through depressive fugues, helps Caleb deal with both his own fears of death and an explicitly described panic attack, and interrogates her own feelings and attitudes—all at relative length and all by the end with reassuringly positive results. In her acknowledgments, the author thanks her therapist for helping her through a similar childhood brush with death. Physical descriptors are minimal.

Suspenseful, if somewhat didactic.