"Alone" by Megan E. Freeman

Huh.

For one thing, I wasn't expecting this to be in verse. For another, I was expecting some form of a supernatural/magical occurrence. (There isn't.) 

Once I got used to the verse format, though, I was pretty much fine with it. And the lack of magic in the book made all the danger and confusing-ness more real, somehow.

I saw quite a few parallels to Out of Range in this book, mostly in the dangers that the main character (in our case, Maddie) has to face. And I mean... the antagonist in both books is really just nature. At its most basic, nature really only has a couple things it can throw at you: wild animals (check), |wildfire| (check), rivers/floods/flooded rivers (check), gravity (Out of Range has gravity-induced danger but Alone doesn't), and extreme temperatures (it becomes winter in Alone but not in Out of Range). 

(This isn't counting any rarer, more esoteric dangers; you can have things like earthquakes and tornadoes and gross parasites and lightning and toxic plants and other stuff I'm forgetting, but that's just the most common, pressing danger you get in you're-alone-in-[envirnonment]-now-trying-to-survive books.) (Actually, |Alone does have a tornado.|)

(Spoiler-tagged musing here: |Of the four elements, the only one that nature didn't find some way to attack Maddie with was earth. She had fire (lightning-induced wildfire), water (flash flood), and air (tornado), but the author never saw fit to throw an earthquake at her|.)

Basically, Maddie plans for a secret sleepover, unbeknownst to either of her divorced parents. Then something happens, there is apparently an "imminent threat" to the western U.S., and Maddie gets left behind in the haste to evacuate everyone because both her parents thought she was with the other one. Pretty much, she's alone in the city now, trying to survive. (And by "alone", I don't mean that her parents are gone, but other people are still in the city. Literally everyone but her is gone.)

The book has a lot of parallels to Island of the Blue Dolphins, by Scott O'Dell. Maddie discovers Chekov's book report (on Island of the Blue Dolphins) and starts comparing herself to Karana, from that. It puts her ordeal in perspective for her; at least she can scavenge canned food, and |only has to survive two years instead of eighteen|. According to the author's afterword-thing, this was intentional. 

Were this a videogame, I'd rate it: A hard T or softish T15+, mostly for swearing. Also, I'd play a videogame of Alone. Probably a survival game, maybe like Scrap Mechanic but without the angry robots or friendly robots or being-a-mechanic aspect.

...dang, now I want Alone to be a videogame so I can play it.

4 stars. The front quote was right; this is a tense book. I actually got book hangover from it, albeit a different type of it from normal. Instead of pining after being in the book's universe still, like normal, I just kept having the tense feelings that the book gave me while I was reading it. I think I'm finally over them now, writing this.

EDIT: Actually, 3 stars, owing to the fact that whenever I see the book, I get Alone flashbacks. It didn't seem that stressful while I was reading it, but after the fact it appears to have stressed me out more than I thought.

(Endnote: Y'know the "imminent threat"? It's actually |just a giant property scam perpetrated by corrupt government officials. That| 🎵plooot twiiiist🎵 |made a lot of sense when I got to thinking about it after I finished the book. It only showed up at the very end, though|.)