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YA
Micah and his parents have disappeared. Right before winter break they stepped into a white van, and Micah's girlfriend Sesame hasn't seen them since. Her only clues to Micah's whereabouts are a cryptic message on his kitchen whiteboard and what he shared before he was taken: his parents had joined a cult led by a man called The Prophet. In dual first-person voices in alternating chapters, Sesame and Micah harrowingly describe their experiences. While Sesame, living in an abandoned garage since her beloved grandmother's death, frantically searches the snowy streets of Minneapolis, distributing missing-person posters and trying to compel local authorities to take action, Micah suffers solitary confinement and starvation under The Prophet's rule in an underground bunker. The vital necessity of personal connection and questions of power and abuse underpin this compelling plot, with reverberations from the recent Nxivm cult revelations and convictions.