Constance Wagner is a selfish and sarcastic northern Chicago suburbanite with everything in life a high school teenager wishes she had; looks, brains, popularity, money, and a boyfriend who, in her mind, idolizes her. Unfortunately, her wonderful world is about to come crashing down as her family's spring break trip to Mexico spirals into a series of devastating events that land the Prima donna into a dank prison cell fortified by a Mexican drug cartel. Hidden in the jungle of southern Mexico, twenty-three hundred miles away from Constance's posh world, lives Miguel Mortez, the only son of the largest drug lord in Mexico. Repulsed and defeatist about his forced upbringing riddled with drug trafficking, prostitutes, and endless graphic violence, Miguel struggles daily to cope with his future. As his feelings for the incarcerated American teenager grow, he is forced into making the hardest decision of his young teenaged life; loyalty to his family's cartel, or following his growing moral consciousness and infatuated heart. Without adequate money, transportation, or even food rations, Constance and Miguel embark on a thirteen-hundred mile quest through Mexico to find and rescue her twin brothers from a cartel compound in northern Mexico. Fighting these nearly insurmountable odds, will their strength and determination, coupled with the limited assistance they receive along the way, be enough to elude capture or death from a Mexican drug cartel that has seemingly endless outstretched tentacles of machine gun toting minions throughout the entire country? Devastating utilizes one-hundred and thirteen thousand words to guide its characters through this young adult suspenseful novel filled with tragedy, dark humor, courage, and a developing affection between two teenagers from polar opposite worlds.
