As a soccer mom, the injury I fear the most for the girls on the field is a concussion.  Broken bones are painful and can lead to long recoveries, but an injury that messes with your brain is terrifying.  As Cat, Ben, Sarah, and Quentin discover, their concussions are only the beginning of the fear they will face in the Florida Everglades.

Kate Messner delivers fast-paced adventure and action combined with cutting edge science in this thriller of a good read.  Wake Up Missing is my favorite kind of science fiction.  It starts out perfectly believable.  Concussions frequently make the news, and I’ve seen students struggle through the effects of them.  Many of the treatments given at I-CAN clinic (thanks for the author’s note at the end!) are cutting edge treatments being used successfully today.  The science twist (provided by an evil scientist running an experiment gone amok) is introduced so gradually that it seems perfectly possible.

I love Cat, the bird watcher.  She wants so badly to become herself again, but she doesn’t quite trust Dr. Ames or the I-CAN clinic.  The questions keep nagging at her even when she can’t quite force her brain to connect the dots.  As she and the other patients–hockey player Sarah, football star Quentin, and horse-lover Ben–start to figure out what is wrong, they don’t want to trust their healing brains.  How could they possibly be right?  But if they are right, time is running out for their escape.

Then the excitement ramps up as they navigate through the deadly Florida Everglades.  If they don’t get lost, if they don’t get eaten by alligators, if they don’t run across drug smugglers, they just might have a slim chance to survive–if they can convince any one to believe their story.