The Booker Rebellion: A Novel

They were taught to pay attention. Now what they’ve noticed could get them killed.

Fifteen-year-old Belinda Booker and her siblings, twelve-year-old Jack and six-year-old Emmy, know the forest surrounding their remote western Oregon home intimately. So when trees are cut down, motorcycle tracks appear on footpaths, and cash turns up beneath a log, they notice.

Then they find a body.

With their parents away fighting wildfires in Alaska and an unfamiliar aunt running the household, the Bookers call in a sheriff’s deputy. It seems like the sensible thing to do. It turns out to be a dangerous mistake.

Soon their aunt is missing, the deputy is obstructing their search, and the siblings are uncovering a plot far bigger than a single death: a secret militia is stockpiling weapons in the woods and preparing to seize the national forest headquarters.

But the Bookers aren’t helpless. Raised by war veterans still serving in the National Guard, they’ve learned to keep their eyes open, think for themselves, and act when something is wrong. Finding their aunt will test every lesson their parents ever taught them—and reveal how little they know about the woman left in charge.

As wildfire threatens the place they call home, the siblings must draw on their wilderness skills and fierce loyalty to one another to survive.

A gripping wilderness thriller with a family’s love at its heart, The Booker Rebellion explores the courage it takes to stand your ground when the people who should protect you become the people you fear.

“A suspenseful wilderness adventure with young heroes worth rooting for.” —Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Oregon journalist Susan Palmer has twice won the “Silk Purse Award” from the Oregon Newspaper Publishers Association, among other regional and national honors. Her first novel, The Tabernacle Bar, “hums alternately with the wry empathy of Barbara Kingsolver and the lyricism of Leslie Marmon Silko,” according to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. A hiker, birder, embroiderer and lover of long two-lane highways, she is also a licensed ham radio operator who once bounced her voice off the moon.

Praise for The Booker Rebellion

“The Booker Rebellion is a fresh, exciting adventure, a book that moves as fast and clear as a mountain creek. Susan Palmer knows the landscape of the Oregon Coast Range intimately, and she brings to the page all the beauty and danger of that country in rich detail, without slowing the wild ride for a moment. I couldn’t stop reading.”
—Molly Gloss, award-winning author of The Jump-Off Creek and Wild Life

“Superbly drawn characters, nonstop action. Highly recommended.”
—Elizabeth Engstrom, author of The Itinerant

“A thrill-seeker’s thriller with head-smacking surprises, gritty wisdom,
fierce resilience and fiercer love at every turn.”
—Paul Neville, author of The Garbage Brothers