In THREE RIVERS, the first novel by former child actor Sarah Stusek which debuted at number 1 on Amazon’s list of New Releases in Teen & Young Adult Literary Fiction, seventeen-year-old Stella is a cast member of a fictional TV series who wakes up one night to discover she’s being kidnapped. Her abductors aren’t autograph hunters, crazed fans, or members of a street gang; they are people hired by Stella’s parents to take their out-of-control daughter to Three Rivers, a wilderness camp in Montana. (This mirrors Stusek’s real-life experience.) In an effort to boost her career, Stella had gone slightly Lindsay Lohan–shoplifting, partying, public spats with other celebs. When her friend Rosie overdosed on drugs and nearly died, it was time for an intervention.
Everyone fends for themselves at Three Rivers. They pitch their own tents. They manage their own food, a week’s worth at a time, which they have to ration. They earn knives to carve their own eating utensils. Profanity is punished with “time taken off dinner.” Rich-girl-in-the-wild is a well-worn format, but Stusek brightens it up by making Stella likable. Yes, she is rude. Yes, she is entitled. Yes, she is overfond of the F-word. She is also funny and insightful. “I’ve made a career out of being uncomfortable,” she muses. “I have been followed by adult men with enormous cameras when I was just trying to get a meal . . . I’ve been criticized for accidentally agreeing to represent the wrong brand of sparkling water. I’ve been too thin and too fat in the same day.” That last line sums up a celebrity’s world. It also sums up a woman’s world.
Stusek is a former child actor who now writes and produces, and this shows in descriptions like “sad, sunbaked, single-story building,” which is just lovely. There are lots of flashbacks to Stella’s acting life, which make a good contrast to the bleak Montana landscape. The other campers are troubled teens like Stella, and they are far from stereotypes: Stusek gives them just enough sarcasm and false bravado to explain their presence in the camp, but not so much that the reader is turned off. Stella’s ordeal changes her, of course, though in surprising ways, and her voice never loses its weary-but-witty essence, which is key to this wonderful story of transformation.
THREE RIVERS, Sarah Stusek’s debut YA novel, brings a fresh approach to timeless childhood themes of inclusion, forgiveness, and change.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader