LIVE, LAUGH, KIDNAP

A sweet scheme goes hilariously wrong for four teens blundering through adolescent thickets.

Violet, Montana, is on the way up thanks to the media and merchandising campaigns of local megachurch pastor Jay Reaps and his equally glossy wife, Ree. But their hunky son, Dustin, really wants out—and signs on with three chance-met young women to engineer his own kidnapping for a share of the presumed reward. His confederates have motives of their own: Zoe hopes she and her secret girlfriend can leave town and closet behind; getting caught with illicit Adderall has cost Holly her prep school scholarship; and an illicit smartphone has given Genesis glimpses of a world and Christian faith that promise more than the stagnant New Age commune in which she’s grown up. As the harebrained caper plays out in the alternating point-of-view chapters, Noone folds in a rich assortment of ruminations, confessions, bonding moments, personal epiphanies, snogging, and occasional prayers to go with the flurry of impulsive acts and comical scrambles. Despite the tale’s farcical tone, she also shapes the minds and developing characters of her cast with a light but respectful hand. Even glib and shallow Dustin gets to come off in the end as not entirely self-absorbed, and though the older adults in the all-White cast are the usual largely clueless and mockable bunch, at least his parents do seem genuinely distressed by his disappearance. The upbeat end leaves everyone unscathed and wiser.

Read, hoot, cherish this satirical romp.