So, when Americans think of the Netherlands, we don’t think of forests. (In fact, when I got ready to write about this book, I remember it as having been set in Norway. Oops.) We think of windmills and Amsterdam and flat flood plains. We don’t think about forests.

But apparently – according to this novel anyway – there is a tradition in the Netherlands of dropping young kids (the equivalent of girl scouts or boy scouts here) in the forest in the Netherlands, blindfolded and disoriented, and leave them to find their way out alone.

Well, that’s not quite as Hansel & Gretel as it sounds: parents are nearby, and they subtly watch over the kids to make sure they’re okay. When the kids make it to the camp at the endpoint, they have hot cocoa waiting and a nice campfire. The idea is that the kids will learn self-reliance and confidence and come back all the better for it. Does that make you feel better about it?

If this still appalls you, oh helicopter and snowplow pilots, you have a sense of what the mother in this book feels when her husband, her 12-year old daughter’s stepfather, suggests it. But struggling aginst her American tendencies, she overcomes her better judgement, and allows her daughter to participate. Her husband will be there, after all, one of the parents watching over the kids.

Oh little does she realize.

I will say that her daughter proves her stepfather right: she is self-reliant and bad-ass. She takes no prisoners. When the older children disappear and she finds herself alone, she has adventure after adventure worse and worse but she comes through in the end. She even saves one of the other girls, if I remember right.

Meanwhile, when the kids don’t show up, her mom is freaking out. She begins to put pieces together, to recognize things that she should have realized before about her life, her first husband, and her second husband. Although her kid is one step ahead of her.

This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. The daughter is competent in a non-annoying way but not with that matter-of-fact capability of say, Hit Girl.* She is still a little girl, after all, and some of her early battles are little-girl battles. Although the later battles are something you’d find in a movie about an adult, female or male. And she comes through.

This book is, to me, a tribute to the strength and ingenuity of kids navigating in that strange world, that world where they have to figure things out on their own: how to tell North without a compass; what to do about that wolf that’s following you; how to get out of a bad situation when you’re smaller than the pack of drug addicts who have captured you; whom to trust, adult or child?

I enjoyed this book. I won’t say that it was beautifully written or that the big secret was a surprise. The characters, aside from the girl, are a little thin. But it’s worth reading, if you want something light. Better than James Patterson or one of those guys, anyway. A light read. But fun. I’d even read it again sometime.

And if you’re a parent of a 12-year old girl and are worried that it will upset you too much, it has a happy ending.

For one little girl, anyway.

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^{*Google it, you Philistine.}