Review: "The Atlas of Us" by Kristin Dwyer

The Atlas of Us by Kristin Dwyer
Published January 2024 via HarperTeen
★★★

The last few months have been awful, and Atlas doesn't have much hope left—so she's been sent out to the wild to do community service trail work. It's not voluntary, and it's a place her father loved deeply—one of the last places she wants to be. On the trail, Atlas is no longer Atlas: she's rechristened Maps, and she's set to work alongside people with equally oblique trail names: Sugar. Books. Junior. King. And it's King, a team lead in his second year of the program, who interests Maps most.

The shape of this community service program is fairly vague—unlike many troubled-teen programs (which this one might or might not be, officially—probably for the best, considering how problematic the troubled teen industry is!), there's little adult oversight, with just-barely-no-longer-teens teaching teens—or telling them to figure it out. Neither Books nor King, the leaders in Maps's group, is talkative, but it's King to whom Maps gravitates, and it's King whom Maps needles and spars with, and it's King with whom she trades smoldering gazes.

Where I really wished for more understanding of this community service program is with fire. It's two things that perhaps speak to something bigger: at one point, Atlas makes an error with fire, and she's read the riot act; later, another character makes a different error (though it's never clear what it is) with a fire, and—I just want to know, were at any point in time these characters taught fire safety basics? Because I'm not convinced that they were. (Fire errors aside, Maps is the designated tent-setter-upper, and she receives almost no more instruction than 'figure it out'.) In a dry state when climate change is upon us, that's just...a sign of bad planning, bad leaders, and a bad program. (I'm also really curious about their trail names, because...typically, trail names are earned, not bestowed ahead of time. I wonder what names they would end up with if they were to name each other?)

With all that in mind: I'm quite sure that I'm going to be in the minority in my neutral-positive opinion here—this will go over like gangbusters for readers of Simone Elkeles and the like. I'm in it for the wilderness, though, rather than for the romance, and I think this would have been a excellent book for me if it had been about friendship rather than romance—but I suspect that most readers will be in it more for the smoldering gazes, and they'll get more out of that (significant) chunk of the book than I did.

Go forth and into the woods, folks. Learn some new skills. Earn a trail name. Don't set anything on fire.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.