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 island seems riddled with secrets but Lucretia (named for Lucretia Mott, "a fierce Quaker" from the 19th century) has a secret or two of her own.
Tensions have always run high between the wealthy (and, frankly, villainous) summer people and the islanders, and no one knows where to place these newcomers at first. Consequently, Lucretia's initial encounters with both groups are confrontational. Undaunted, she explores the island--inadvertently adopting an osprey chick along the way--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. Her mother affords Lucretia a surprising amount of independence even though mother and daughter still struggle with anxiety and nightmares about the speed with which accidents can happen. The fact that Lucretia sees the world through an artist's lens gives the author plenty of opportunities to showcase her poetic way with words. When listening to a mystery singer hidden somewhere in a rocky bluff overlooking the ocean, for example, the girl is moved by the music: "He was singing a story. A sad one that suddenly became something else and then something else again, the colors changing as the story did, from a radiant magenta to some kind of violet. And then a gold I rarely heard."
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
Shelf Talker: Newbery Honor author Lauren Wolk showcases her superbly lyrical writing in this novel featuring a 12-year-old artist who confronts grief and manages secrets on her new island home in Maine.