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Book Reviewed by:"A complete knockout. Readers will be thinking of this story long after they finish the final page." —Adalyn Grace, New York Times bestselling author of Belladonna
Atlas has lost her way.
In a last-ditch effort to pull her life together, she's working on a community service program rehabbing trails in the Western Sierras. The only plus is that the days are so exhausting that Atlas might just be tired enough to forget that this was one of her dad's favorite places in the world. Before cancer stole him from her life, that is.
Using real names is forbidden on the trail. So Atlas becomes Maps, and with her team—Books, Sugar, Junior, and King—she heads into the wilderness. As she sheds the lies she's built up as walls to protect herself, she realizes that four strangers might know her better than anyone has before. And with the end of the trail racing to meet them, Maps is left counting down the days until she returns to her old life—without her new family, and without King, who's become more than just a friend.
In her second novel for young adults, Kristin Dwyer crafts a moving character study, a portrait of a young woman in search not only of healing, but also of a way back to herself. Maps's journey through grief is almost painfully authentic, both in how she's determined not to let her pain define her and how that pain breaks the surface at the most surprising and inconvenient times. In this story, as in real life, grief and anger become intertwined—making her way through that thicket is every bit as challenging as hacking through the thick and tangled debris that blocks the trail: "It's not just the sad, or the broken, it's all the moments where I don't get to control the way I miss someone."..continued
Full Review
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(Reviewed by Norah Piehl).
In Kristin Dwyer's The Atlas of Us, Atlas and her friends are given trail names by their program director; these nicknames allow Atlas (trail name Maps) to create a new identity and forge a new beginning, one unencumbered by her personal history. Names in Dwyer's novel serve a symbolic purpose, but there's a very real phenomenon of trail names among long-distance hikers.
Trail names haven't always been part of hiking culture; the tradition seems to have possibly begun in the 1970s, around the time when through-hiking the Appalachian Trail (AT) became a popular pastime. Trail names allowed hikers, especially along the AT, to adopt a new persona, one that could be anonymous, egalitarian, and fun. As one hiker puts it, "Trail names ...
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