Drifters
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Last Day on Mars comes a riveting new mystery, set within the Dark Star universe, about a girl who sets out to find her missing best friend—and discovers her small town is hiding a dark, centuries-old secret.
Jovie is adrift. She’d been feeling alone ever since her best friend, Micah, left her behind for a new group of friends—but when Micah went missing last fall, Jovie felt truly lost.
Now, months later, the search parties have been called off, and the news alerts have dried up. There’s only Jovie, biking around Far Haven, Washington, putting up posters with Micah’s face on them, feeling like she’s the only one who remembers her friend at all.
This feeling may be far closer to the truth than Jovie knows. As strange storms beset Far Haven, she is shocked to discover that Micah isn’t just missing—she’s been forgotten completely by everyone in town. And Micah isn’t the only one: there are others, roaming the beaches, camped in the old bunkers, who have somehow been lost from the world.
When Jovie and her new friend Sylvan dig deeper, they learn that the town’s history is far stranger and more deadly than anyone knows. Something disastrous is heading for Far Haven, and Jovie and Sylvan soon realize that it is up to them to save not only Micah, but everyone else who has been lost to the world and set adrift—now, in the past, and in the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Emerson (Lost in Space: Infinity's Edge) ambitiously juggles multiple timelines in this speculative tale. Far Haven, Wash., is a small town filled with mysteries stemming from an incident at the old nuclear plant, such as inexplicable illnesses and dangerous storms, with the secretive Barsuda Solutions, a local sanitation company, always in the background. In 2022, 14-year-old Sylvan is once again interrogated by Far Haven authorities regarding classmate Jovie's disappearance four years prior. In 2018, 13-year-old Jovie desperately searches for her best friend Micah, whom no one seems to remember after she vanished a year before. When Jovie meets Mason, a boy only she can see via a spyglass she was given anonymously, she discovers Drifters, people whose corporeal forms are disconnected from the world, and suspects that was Micah's fate. But as Jovie, Mason, and Sylvan search for the truth about Far Haven, they uncover a terrible secret that spans centuries. The connection between the novel's myriad themes—such as government conspiracies, supernatural intervention, and alien contact—is sometimes ambiguous and makes for a jam-packed read, but the protagonists' perseverance and the narrative's countdown toward an unknown event maintain gripping tension throughout. Most characters cue as white. Ages: 8–12.
