AUGUSTA, GONE: A TRUE STORY by Martha Tod Dudman, Simon & Schuster, New York, 255 pages, 2001, $23

It’s “Little Red Riding Hood” for the 21st century; it’s Martha Tod Dudman’s terrifying, cautionary tale, “Augusta, Gone.”

In this grim account, not just innocent young girls are prey – all young people, everywhere, even on Mount Desert Island, home of millions of memorable vacations, idyllic summers. But what happens when the tourists go home? That’s when all the ills that teen-age flesh are heir to come out of the woods and gobble them up, with teeth as big as the Porcupine Islands.

Dudman’s book chronicles the adolescence of her daughter (most names have been changed in the book); describes the anguish of a mother watching her children stray from home; and, along the way, lays plenty of blame – both on her own doorstep and beyond. Beginning with the day – or one of the days – when Augusta leaves home, and going back to attempt understanding through an account of Augusta’s coming-of-age, Dudman clearly attempts to be as honest as she is capable of being.

A single mother (divorced when Augusta was 3, her brother, Jack, 2), she soon found herself working long hours, at her mother’s radio stations in Ellsworth, and doing the usual single-parent dance: work, house, kids, school, after-school. “And sometimes,” she writes, “it seemed as if I were doing a wonderful balancing act, balancing it all on the tip of my nose.”

Then come the less-than-wonderful years, when Augusta spins out of control. Rage, drugs, bad friends, bad choices create a spiral that feeds on itself and tornado-like wipes out everything in its path. Augusta skips school. Augusta comes home stoned. Augusta is missing for a night. Augusta is gone.

Nothing works, not counseling, not conciliating, not attempts at making rules – and sticking to them. When Dudman and her ex-husband finally realize that Augusta’s life is in danger, either from an overdose, AIDS or violence, they decide to send her away, first to a summer camp and then to a residential school in the West. Writing about the community of social workers/therapists/educators that exists for the sole purpose of trying to save kids whose own communities have failed them, Dudman leaves no doubt that whatever village was supposed to nurture these kids has clearly dropped the ball.

Not that she spares herself. Whereas it’s perfectly true that Augusta hates school (and the feeling seems to be largely mutual), that her friends’ parents are no more in control than Dudman herself, and that drugs appear to be more available than Big Macs, Augusta’s mother is at the heart of this book. Page after page, Dudman reveals her own past and her present, seeking answers.

The reader is repeatedly struck by the parallels between the teen-age years of mother and daughter – parallels that Dudman draws to our attention. Suspended from high school for using drugs, and thus unable to go through graduation ceremonies, Dudman often made many of the bad choices her daughter did. She snuck out of the house, lied to her parents, took off for California, rebelled and raged in every way she could. In fact, her own past makes it easier to understand her daughter’s present: “We’re made one way, my daughter, you and I.”

Dudman is unsparing, too, about her own part in Augusta’s troubles, “the daughter,” she writes, “that (she) most deserve(s).” What part did the divorce play, the endless hours at work, the distractions, worry and anger? “We’re lousy parents,” Dudman thinks to herself, “and now we have lousy kids.” And, as Augusta continually flees from home, so too does Dudman – compulsively walking, hiking, escaping: “If I walk fast, I don’t have to think,” she tells us; “How come she gets to run away? I want to. I want to run away.”

Those readers who have raised teen-agers will recognize many of their concerns and worries in Dudman’s: the need for a simple timeout, the reluctant anger at the children we love, the search for solutions, the frequent fits of denying what’s in front of our faces.

For all of the book’s undeniable honesty, though, we may feel most separated from Dudman by her decision to focus so relentlessly on herself; our suspicion that writing the book became a form of therapy for her can only be confirmed when she writes, describing a session with her therapist, “I can only say how I feel. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? Isn’t that the idea – you say how you feel and someone listens to you, and somehow that makes it better?”

Readers also may be suspicious about the immediacy of “Augusta, Gone;” the decision to write a book before having any sense of real perspective and to use the present tense – heightening the feeling of a writer still seeing trees, not yet forest – leads inevitably to as many questions at the end as at the beginning. Dudman herself admits that “the memories are so uneven and so jangled that I can’t (tell it straight).”

Where the book is strongest, though, is at the very places where what Dudman writes seems most universal, most true to all troubled humans, not only those from upper-middle-class families on the coast of Maine. Wrestling with the question of just exactly how parents can help their at-risk children, she wonders what happens to the ones for whom nothing seems to work:

“They become drunks or drug addicts. … They get AIDS or they get something else. … They aren’t heard from in years. … They are the people they used to be afraid of. They’re the people you told them not to look at. … They are in cities. They are in shelters. They are in doorways. … You cannot stop their crying, or love them anymore.”

A cautionary tale, indeed: and not just for our sons and daughters, but for all of us who have a duty to provide communities that support, nurture and love. At the book’s end, Augusta has come home – but too many of her friends are still “gone.”