Three Rivers: A Novel

This isn’t happening. It’s only a nightmare, only a stupid dream. Just wake up, Stella!

But it isn’t a dream. Two strangers take Stella from her bedroom in the middle of the night and haul her off to Three Rivers, a wilderness therapy program for troubled teens.

At the program, Stella puts up as much resistance to participating as she can. She’s not an “at-risk youth”―she’s not a felon or a druggie or an arsonist like the rest of the kids in her group. She’s a normal teenager who happens to star on a hit TV show. But slowly, despite herself, she starts to open up, make friends, and confront why she was really sent there.

Sarah Stusek got her start in the film and television industry as a child actor when she was five years old. She was born and raised in Annapolis, MD, and attended Coastal Carolina University, where she fell in love with being on the other side of the camera. After graduation she worked her way up on hit programs like HBO's VEEP and Netflix's House of Cards. She has since started her own production company, Stusek Studios, which produces commercials, films, and digital content. Sarah has been searching for a way to tell the story of her experience as a child actor sent to a wilderness therapy program in Montana (by two people her parents hired to take her in the middle of the night!) for the past ten years. The result is Three Rivers, her debut novel. She currently lives in Alexandria, VA, with her boyfriend and their boxer dog, Beau.