How does an honor student at one of Los Angeles’ finest prep schools – a bright, beautiful girl from a loving home – trade school uniforms and afternoons at the beach for shooting up in the back of a van in rural Indiana? How does her devoted mother emerge from the shock of finding that her daughter has not only disappeared but had been living a secret life for more than a year?
     Mother and daughter tell their parallel stories in gripping and provocative first-person accounts. Claire Fontaine’s story is a parent’s worst nightmare: having to save three-year-old Mia first from an abusive father, then a decade later from herself; dealing with Mia's manipulative, drug-fueled behavior and repeated disappearances; each time to do worse things with worse people, learning that Mia, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, was too far gone and strung out to notice that her drug dealers were skinheads.
     Claire's search for Mia was brutal for both mother and daughter, a dizzying series of dead ends, incredible coincidences and, at times, miracles - across three states. Desperate to save Mia, Claire ultimately forced her only child into a harsh-but-loving boot camp school in Eastern Europe, later in Montana.
     Mia's story details her precarious refuge in the abyss of criminals and heroin addicts, the painful childhood trauma that caused her near self-destruction, and her remarkable, if controversial, process of healing. The environment at Mia's school was alien, the rules extreme.
     But for an extreme kid, extreme measures worked and Mia overcame addiction, depression, and self-hatred to emerge a strong and positive young woman who in three years went from the back of a van in rural Indiana to one of our nation's most prestigious universities.
     Parents had to go through their own "boot camp" and Claire relates her own often painful process of self-examination with unsparing honesty and humor. What both women learned on their journey changed them forever, empowering them to transform their once-shattered relationship and their destinies.
     Alternately heart-wrenching and hilarious, Come Back is powerful portrayal of the primal bond between mother and daughter that will resonate with readers long after they've put it down.