Interesting take on the Appalachian Trail. Megan's 11 and stuck in Vermont for the summer, but all she wants is to see her best friend, Lucy, whose mother is battling cancer. Make no mistake: it's not that Megan wants to be there to support her best friend: it's more than she wants Lucy around to alleviate Megan's boredom. (She's worried about Lucy's mother but doesn't really know what to think of it and would rather worry about herself.) So when Megan gets lost in the woods and stumbles across the AT, she decides to follow it down to Massachusetts, near where Lucy is spending the summer.

Megan only covers about thirty miles of the AT here, or a tiny fraction—something like 1.4%—of the total distance. Because she's eleven and not outdoorsy and prone to getting lost and so on, this takes her the better part of a week. She does some growth over the course of it, but it comes so suddenly and so late in the book that I'm not sure it felt earned. And...good golly there are a lot of secondary/tertiary characters who figure out what she's doing (i.e., that she's the missing girl whose parents think she might be dead) and are just, like, 'welp, seems important to her, so guess we'd better let her parents go on believing she's dead for another couple days'.

I trust there will eventually be more light/YA Appalachian Trail fiction, because I've made it through the books (all three of them) that I know of, and...they're fun.