Especially striking is the personal growth Maddie experiences over time as she handles frightening situations: a band of looters, a tornado, and a severe injury. Maddie's first-person narrative is expressed perfectly through Freeman's verses, in short passages and spare images. Maddie is finally resigned to living out her life alone when help finally arrives. Months and then years pass with her only company the neighbor's rottweiler, George. By the next day, however, everyone else is gone, evacuated ahead of an 'imminent threat.' While she waits to be rescued, Maddie uses her common sense and courage to figure out how to survive. (Jan.)īooklist Review Maddie, 12, has the perfect plan to spend the night with her two best friends, away from parents and siblings, but when it falls through, Maddie takes advantage of the solitude.

Agent: Deborah Warren, East West Literary. The explanation of the 'imminent danger' that left Maddie alone is vague and hasty, however-after readers follow a worthy protagonist through three years of solitude and despair, the abrupt resolution disappoints. The lengths to which resourceful Maddie must go in order to survive feel realistic, and Freeman's well-paced verse magnifies significant and harrowing moments. Most of all, she must overcome the unending loneliness and uncertainty that each day brings. With only the neighbor's rottweiler as a companion, Maddie spends the next three years surviving on her own-gathering food from abandoned stores, navigating ever-changing and sometimes dangerous weather, and hiding from looters and wild dogs.

An unexpected middle-of-the-night evacuation leaves Maddie completely alone in her small Colorado town, without power, information, or any way to communicate with loved ones.

When 12-year-old Maddie's plans for a secret sleepover fall through, she decides to stay at her grandparents' empty summer apartment solo, having already lied to her divorced parents about her whereabouts. Publishers Weekly Review Poet Freeman makes her middle grade debut with this engaging survival story in verse based on Island of the Blue Dolphins.

Alone book freeman