THE OTHER SIDE OF LOST

Girl Online meets Wild in this contemporary YA novel about a girl who embarks on a solo 200-mile hike after abandoning the online persona she worked so hard to perfect.

The perfect sunset? Instagram filtered. The perfect body? She has been hungry for days. The perfect boyfriend? Fake. Every one of Mari Turner's social media posts was a carefully-constructed photo meant to distract her and her thousands of followers from the fact that she has no direction in life, no friends, and no idea how she got to this place of emptiness. So after spending her eighteenth birthday alone, Mari does something she has not done for a very long time. She looks into the lens of her camera and tells the truth. Then she posts it for the world to see. When her video confession goes viral, everyone turns on her, leaving Mari more desperate than ever to escape.

Then the package arrives. A box full of hiking gear that belonged to her late cousin Bri. Mari and Bri shared the same birthday, and had always talked about hiking the John Muir Trail together when they turned eighteen. That was before Mari got so wrapped up in her online world that she turned her back on their friendship. Mari's video was a cry for a help, and with Bri's gear in her hands, she takes a leap of faith. Mari has zero experience reading a map or climbing rocks, but as lost as she has been feeling, one or two wrong turns are not going to make a difference.

With Bri's boots and trail diary as her guide as well as a group of strangers that become friends Mari slowly makes her way through the highest mountains and lowest valleys in an attempt to find her way back to the girl she used to be.

Jessi Kirby is a writer for young adults whose first book, Moonglass, was named an ABA New Voices Pick. She has also written four other novels In Honor, Golden, Things We Know by Heart, and The Secret History of Us. Jessi lives in central California with her husband and two kids.