From the End to the Beginning

I'm working on my next book, with the end in mind.  Can't wait to work this out and see what capers these kids get into!  This story is about pretending:  The adults pretend too much (as in everything is fine, when it's not) and the kids don't pretend enough (too busy with 'activities' and not enough unstructured playtime.) 

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.