… All these bad things happen and she has to survive them. I felt like I was there with her throughout the book. “It was compelling to me because there was a girl my age and she had to go through all these things. It was a great page-turning book,” Lucia said, adding that typically she doesn’t like survival books but could identify with the character. Twelve-year-old Lucia Brown of the Boulder area was “super excited” when Freeman’s book came out and rushed to buy it at the bookstore, she said. “Children are fascinated by the survival elements of it and the psychological and emotional toll that loneliness takes,” Freeman said. But at the same time, they would have to take care of themselves and find the resources to solve their problems, she said. Maddie has “power and autonomy,” but also responsibility and fear and a deep vulnerability, Freeman said, adding that children like the concept of being the only one around, not having to check in with their parents. Freeman mentioned that the island was also the girl’s home, but then began contemplating the idea of a contemporary retelling of the story but set in a small Front Range town. Freeman had read the novel in her Mother-Daughter Book Club, where members said how incredible it was for Karana to survive. She escapes fires, floods, storms, looters and wild animals and faces extreme loneliness with her only companions being books and her dog.įreeman found inspiration for Maddie’s story from Scott O’Dell’s classic historical fiction novel, “Island of the Blue Dolphins,” published in 1960, about a girl named Karana who’s left behind on an island after her tribe is evacuated. Without access to any modern conveniences like power, the internet and working phone lines, Maddie has to learn how to survive on her own. “Alone” is a novel-in-verse that tells Maddie’s survivalist story of waking up from a secret sleepover and finding her small Colorado town mysteriously evacuated and abandoned.

“What would you do if you were in Maddie’s situation? Could you survive alone?” “I think it’s really compelling about the idea of being the only person left somewhere,” said Freeman, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet who writes middle grade and young adult fiction.

So she created 12-year-old Maddie and a Rottweiler named George for her debut middle grade novel, “Alone,” published Jan. Freeman couldn’t get the idea out of her mind of a middle schooler being left entirely alone in a Colorado community just like hers.

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