Feral Youth

Feral Youth by Shaun David Hutchinson, Brandy Colbert, Suzanne Young, Tim Floreen, Justina Ireland, Alaya Dawn Johnson, Stephanie Kuehn, E. C. Myers, Marieke Nijkamp, and Robin Talley    310 pages

At Zeppelin Bend, an outdoor education program designed to teach troubled youth the value of hard work, cooperation, and compassion, ten teens are left alone in the wild. The teens are a diverse group who come from all walks of life, and they were all sent to Zeppelin Bend as a last chance to get them to turn their lives around. They’ve just spent nearly two weeks learning to survive in the wilderness, and now their instructors have dropped them off eighteen miles from camp with no food, no water, and only their packs, and they’ll have to struggle to overcome their vast differences if they hope to survive.

Did it live up to the blurbs on the book - specifically the ones that caught my attention and made me want to give it a shot - i.e. "inspired by the Canterbury Tales," and the cover, let's be honest, is so beautiful and really fits my aesthetic - not really. I can see no connection that would warrant saying it's inspired by the Canterbury Tales other than that there are a whole bunch of people who are going somewhere and tell stories along the way - but kinda not really. 

The premise is a bit forced - the "narrator" suggests a storytelling contest for $100 dollars and, surprisingly, these disparate teens who seem to hate everything and each other, decide to go along with it. Their journey is a forced journey - they're in a "boot camp" of sorts for teens who broke the law in one way or another, and they've been prepped to survive in the woods and are then dumped in the middle of the woods, WITH NO COMPASSES, a flare gun that doesn't work, a knife, and sleeping bags. What kind of program thinks this is a good idea to let teens loose in the middle of the woods and expects them to get back at all, let alone unharmed? They weren't even given food!

I call B.S. on that whole business. The stories are loosely meant to explain why each teen is at the "camp" but mostly each story - and I mean all of them - is met with extreme doubt and bluff-calling. No one believes anyone's story is the "truth" and the beginning of the book contains a premise by the narrator about "what is the truth, anyway? You don't know my truth, you only know what you want to believe," and, "we're teens - no one believes us or wants to or understands us!!!" Okay, I get it. Teens are misrepresented all the time, misunderstood, yada yada. I was a teen. I work with teens. They're not all that mysterious. 

Now, the stories - some I liked, some I hated, some were straight up strange. The only story I really liked ended in a brutal murder, so I hope that teen's story wasn't actually true. Either way. This book was bizarre, at best, and does it's best to capture the unique teen experience, presenting a diverse cast of teens and their stories, attempting to address current issues, like woman's rights, minority rights, rape, etc. Some of the authors were successful in that regard, some not so much.