Ten teens are left alone in the wilderness during a three-day survival test in this multi-authored novel led by award-winning author Shaun David Hutchinson.
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 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 hiking, working, 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.
Inspired by The Canterbury Tales, the characters in Feral Youth, each complex and damaged in their own ways, are enticed to tell a story (or two) with the promise of a cash prize. The stories range from noir-inspired revenge tales to mythological stories of fierce heroines and angry gods. And while few of the stories are claimed to be based in truth, they ultimately reveal more about the teller than the truth ever could.
"Nothing we did mattered because, to our families, we were only what we'd done to get sent here. It's all they would ever see."
"Whether a story is true isn't important if you're hurting all the same because of it."
"If you keep feeding the fire, it will grow and wait to devour you. You don't realize it until it's too late."
"My crime is being female in a place that values male education over mine."
"I don't know how much of what any of them said was the truth, but it doesn't matter because the truth doesn't exist in our words but in the spaces between them."
