Not much is going right for Kammie. Before she moved to what she refers to as Nowheresville, Texas, her father was convicted of embezzlement, and she was ostracized at school. Now poor and disheartened, she decides to remake herself and seeks out a cadre of her new school's queen bees. That's how she wound up with her hair chopped into short hunks and stuck in an old well. With no guarantee the girls who lured her to the spot will go for help, Kammie reflects on the ways things went wrong and dreams about what she would like life to ideally be. As night falls and depleting oxygen leads her to loop through her feelings, the abandoned girl is finally discovered. Readers will be eager to find out if she is rescued at last, and if she manages her life better in the incident's aftermath. A different sort of bullying book, with the spotlight never leaving the victim, it should strike a chord with its tween audience.

Eleven-year-old Kammie tells most of this story from inside the well into which she's fallen after a (fake) initiation into a popular-girls' clique. For much of the brief text, readers are right there with Kammie, learning vivid details of her predicament. Kammie's voice--often funny, but with enough truths about her problems in and out of the well that we take her seriously--is compelling.

Gr 4-6 Kammie Summers is wedged partway down a well shaft, unable to move her arms and possibly running low on oxygen. In a funny, surreal, occasionally heartbreaking stream-of-consciousness narrative, Kammie ponders the clique of girls whose mean-spirited initiation ritual caused her fall down the well and who don't feel as much urgency about her rescue as Kammie (and readers) might hope. She contemplates her mother, frazzled from working two jobs; her father, in prison for embezzling money from a children's charity; and the fallout from her dad's terrible decisions, including their move to the backwater town where her attempts to make friends led to this catastrophe. Kammie's spiky but sympathetic narration yields a compulsively readable story, traveling swiftly from friendship woes to sibling conflict to conversations with the silver Francophone coyote she hallucinates as the oxygen situation deteriorates. Rivers provides Kammiealong with the coyote and some unfriendly zombie goatsauthentic feelings of guilt, anger, loneliness, and self-pity about her circumstances in and out of the immediate danger of the well. Though the book confronts both the specter of death and the reality of parental betrayal, Rivers has a middle grade audience in mind; the tangential meandering keeps the pacing snappy, and Kammie emerges from the well reasonably intact. The narrative falters at the very end as uplifting resolutions come too easily, but middle grade readers likely won't mind the rosy lens. VERDICT An unusual story with uncommonly truthful emotions. Robbin E. Friedman, Chappaqua Library, NY