Newbery Honor-winning author Lauren Wolk (Wolf Hollow; Echo Mountain) explores loss, creativity, honesty, and friendship with grace and restraint in Candle Island, an elegant, engrossing novel about a girl adjusting to her new home on an island off the coast of Maine.
A few months after 12-year-old Lucretia's father's sudden, tragic death, she and her mother, both artists surviving on the now-famous paintings her mother sells in New York, seek a fresh start on tiny Candle Island. The place seems riddled with secrets but Lucretia has a secret or two of her own. Tensions have always run high between the islanders and the wealthy (and villainous) summer people, so no one knows where to place these newcomers at first. Undaunted, she explores the island and attempts to connect with townies Bastian and Murdock, each of whom has a secret artistic talent. It's only when the strain between island factions reaches a breaking point that the three finally begin to come together in tentative friendship.
Lucretia is notably mature for her age, and her relationship with her mother reflects the way they have adapted to life with shared secrets, grief, and passion for art. Lauren Wolk writes about knotty subjects with delicacy and great care. Characters are frugal with their secrets, divulging them measuredly only after finding recipients worthy of their trust. The complexity of class dynamics is revealed adroitly through interactions with and the attitudes of the residents of the island as the tweens formulate their own identities as artists and citizens of the human race. --Emilie Coulter, freelance writer and editor