Close Your Eyes, Hold Hands by Chris Bohjalian (2014)

I think I picked up this book, because it said it was set partially in Burlington, VT, where I have good friends. I will have to ask them about some of the details here. I did look at a map of VT and found Lake Memphremagog on the border with Canada, and found that there is not a nuclear power plant there. The author is a journalist from Burlington who has over the years met a lot of "troubled teens" and finds that some manage to struggle through difficult circumstances, while others just get lost. The interview with him and his daughter, who narrates the book, helped put this work in perspective for me. He had turned to his daughter to get the slang right, and in turn she admired her dad for being able to get into the mind of a teen girl.

At one point Emily goes back to her highly contaminated home, she misses her dog, her family, her things. This reminded me of a novel I read by a Ukrainian-American about an elderly woman, who goes back to live out her life in Chernobyl - she did not care how sick she got, she wanted to spend the rest of it at home.

The title comes from the school shootings in CT, when the other children were told to close their eyes and hold hands, as they were led out of the school, so they would not see the bodies of their schoolmates. I am not quite sure how this applies to this book, except that the book gives you a very real sense of the homeless and runaway teen world and the author is leading you through this, though maybe not with totally closed eyes. You know this is a fictional story, but you know this is happening to thousands of people across the country.

Maybe I will have time to add more to this review, but it will have to do for now.