Rogue River Academy

When a 16-year-old girl is sent to an abusive therapeutic boarding school in the Oregon wilderness, she must face her deepest fear – wildfire – and channel her rage and grief over the climate crisis and her dad's death to lead her campmates to safety as a wildfire looms in the distance

It's 3 a.m., and the rattle of a heavy chain awakens Sage, 16. Within minutes, Sage is taken out of her house with a chain wrapped around her waist, escorted by two men to a therapeutic boarding school in a national forest in Oregon. Sage's mother sends her away because she is falling apart. Steeped in anger and fear, Sage is shut down due to her father's death and the surreal smoke days that increasingly engulf her California town. Climate anxiety weighs heavily on Sage, as does her hypercompetitive community where grades are everything and her fears for the future are shut down. But the boarding school, Rogue River Academy, is not safe. Its mentors are sadistic and embrace in-your-face tactics. Students are screamed at and forced to confess their faults in a sick, circle-time therapy. Sage is already in a weakened state due to the wildfires raging about 50 miles away, much closer than they were at home. Then, the school sends her out on a wilderness therapy intervention. Sage, her bunkmate, Rayne, and a sympathetic mentor run away from the wilderness intervention. The chase for them is on, led by a vicious, two-faced mentor and a volatile, unstable student. Good thing Sage's deceased father, one of California's foremost experts in wildfire, taught her some of what he knew.

Pamela Martineau is a former newspaper journalist, now freelance writer, who lives in Portland, Maine. She holds an MFA from the Stonecoast Writers Program at the University of Southern Maine and a BA in English from UC Berkeley. Before her career as a journalist and during sabbaticals, she taught English in California, China, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and a juvenile detention facility in Boston. She is former fiction editor at The Stonecoast Review. An avid hiker and cook, Pamela is mother of two adult sons. This is her first novel.