The Truth Lies Here

Gr 9 Up—Penny is returning for her yearly visit to Bone Lake, MI, to see her father. She's also hoping to get a good start on her admission essay for college by creating a journalistic piece about the town and why the plastics factory died there. But something is not quite right about this sleepy community when weird things start happening. A football player and his girlfriend have disappeared and so does Penny's father. She and her friends spot a charred deer at a local barn party. Soon after, men in black suits are strolling around Main Street. Penny realizes something is afoot when chunks of her memory go missing. Klingele has done a marvelous job here with some beloved science fiction tropes (government conspiracies, Bigfoot, and meteorite crashes), offering a believable story for teens who love coming-of-age stories in the vein of Stranger Things or science fiction shows like The Twilight Zone or The X-Files.