Rogue River Academy

Sixteen-year-old Sage is sent to an abusive therapeutic boarding school in the Oregon wilderness where 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 wildfire looms in the distance.

It's 3 a.m., and the rattle of a heavy chain awakens Sage Lawrence, 16. Within minutes, Sage is taken out of her house with a chain wrapped around her waist and escorted by two men to a therapeutic boarding school in Oregon. Sage's mother sends Sage 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 where her mother sends her, Rogue River Academy in the Rogue River – Siskiyou National Forest, is not a safe place. Its mentors are sadistic and embrace an in-your-face therapy adopted from a cult-like, self-help group. Students are screamed at and forced to confess their faults in a sick, circle-time therapy. The philosophy is to tear them down to build them up. Sage is already in a weakened state due to the wildfires raging about 50 miles away, much closer than they were at home. Now she must endure this so-called "therapy."

Pamela Martineau is a former newspaper journalist, now freelance writer, who lives in Portland, Maine. She holds an MFA in creative writing 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.