Finders Keepers is a contemporary fiction 40,000 word
novel for the middle grades. Ten-year-old
Amber Hart, an ambitious and popular girl who uses scheming and back-stabbing
to mask a learning disability, must start over when her parents lose their home
to foreclosure. She becomes friends with
Sam, also 10, whose family are what some people call Doomsday Preppers. Sam uses his zest for “survivalism” to mask
loneliness. Amber and Sam spend their
afternoons making up games and battling imaginary creatures in the woods that
separate the picture-perfect suburban Ridge from the more rural-like Old Town; both
are in the city of Meadow Creek. One day
as the two play in the woods a helicopter whirs overhead. Then another.
Amber’s mom tells her she is not allowed to play in the woods anymore,
because something dangerous hides there.
What? She will not say. Sam’s father tells him the same thing. But Amber is not a child who accepts “because
I said so” as an answer. She and Sam
decide to find the thing in the woods themselves—or not— and prove to the
grown-ups their favorite play place is safe, and they should be allowed back
in.
Padma is an “apartment-kid” in Meadow Creek Ridge where Amber and her
family moved. For many years, popular
Amber and her friends shunned her simply because she didn’t live in a
house. Apartment kids could not be in
the popular clique. Period. But when Amber surprisingly moves in next
door to Padma, she hopes that will change.
Instead, Amber is shunned as an “apartment-kid," moving Padma no
closer to the popular circle of friends.
Smart Padma discovers she can win favor with Amber's old friends, though, by
spying on Amber. She’s being used, and she
knows it, but she finally feels liked.
So, when Amber and Sam sneak into the woods, Padma follows
them. She reports back to the popular
kids that Amber is looking for something in the woods. The popular kids devise a plan to scare Amber
and Sam. Adventures follow. More to come on that!
But what the kids don’t realize—either because the parents
aren’t being completely honest with them or are just too busy to know it—there
really IS something dangerous lurking in the woods. And when a child goes missing, the divided
town must come together to find her, and reveal a dark secret no one, especially
the Ridgers who worry about their homes’ property values, wants brought to
light.
