Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

**A girl must survive an extreme wilderness experience to prove to her mother that she has the strength to pursue her dreams. “A heart-pounding wilderness adventure set against a deeply moving personal journey.”—Teresa Toten, author of The Unlikely Hero of Room 13B “A gorgeous novel about mothers and daughters, the wilderness that rages both inside and outside of us—and how the past composes the future.”—Caroline Leavitt, New York Times bestselling author of Is This Tomorrow** Then: Ingrid traveled all over Europe with her opera star mother, Margot-Sophia. Life was beautiful and bright, and every day soared with music. Now: Ingrid is on a summertime wilderness survival trek for at-risk teens: addicts, runaways, and her. She’s fighting to survive crushing humiliations, physical challenges that push her to her limits, and mind games that threaten to break her. Then: When the curtain fell on Margot-Sophia’s singing career, they buried the past and settled into a small, painfully normal life. But Ingrid longed to let the music soar again. She wanted it so much that, for a while, nothing else mattered. Now: Ingrid is never going to make it through this summer if she can’t figure out why she’s here . . . and why the music really stopped.

Ingrid has made a deal with her mother: she gets to go to the school of her choice as long as she completes a three-week wilderness programme. But when Ingrid arrives, she quickly realizes there has been a terrible mistake: there will be no marshmallows or cabins here. Instead, her group will embark on a torturous trek, with almost no guidance from the two counsellors and supplied with only the things they can carry. On top of this, the other teen participants are at risk youth , a motley crew of screw-ups, lunatics and delinquents. But as the laborious days go by, and as memories of her complicated past come flooding back, Ingrid must confront the question of whether she shares more in common with these troubled teens than she's willing to admit.