Twelve-year-old Eliot Dionisi is incredulous that his parents would cruelly send him off to live with "wrinkly old relatives" in Nova Scotia's Point Aconi, depriving him of a glorious summer with his best friends.
Eliot's "wrinkly old relatives" are Grandmother McNeil and his great-uncle Earl with the icy stare, gold tooth and anchor tattoo, but before Eliot knows it, he's made new kid friends and is waist-deep in the "grayish green" ocean with the intriguing, chestnut-haired Mary Beth McGillivery. It doesn't take long for two local boys, Jack and Eddie McLeod, to warn him that their older brother Donnie "won't like some Eye-talian kid from away coming around," and the bully is as scary as they say. Because dangers lurk, promises of future clambakes, blueberry-picking and lighthouse-exploring feel like cold comfort, and even Uncle Earl's "special dinner," involving a bulbous-eyed lobster that "might crawl across the table and eat me," doesn't exactly cheer him up. Things look up considerably as Eliot builds some good, solid Nova Scotia-style skills and deepens his relationships with his new friends and family. Sea Change is about evolution, hope, compassion and second chances, and the wonderfully spun narrative is always buoyant.
Canadian author-artist Frank Viva (Young Frank, Architect) draws on his own memories of Nova Scotia summers. He illustrates his often-funny, often-poignant story with cartoonish, pinkish-red people, trucks and fish, and the type pours into tea cups or beams in rays through an attic window. Sea Change, a literary and visual ode to small-town Nova Scotia, is the novel equivalent of the best summer-vacation postcard a person could get. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness