What Happened Then
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In this alternating narrative by bestselling author Erin Soderberg Downing, a decades-old family secret is buried within the sand, water, and woods… waiting for cousins Avery and Jax to find it and uncover the truth.
Avery is a firecracker. In a crayon box of colors, she’s the shocking pink and laser lemon, when all she wants is to be a quiet tan or soft cornflower blue. Her cousin, Jax, is a wall flower, because sometimes it’s better to stay quiet when the alternative is to be told that you’re doing or saying everything wrong. They seem to be the only ones who don’t know what happened years ago when their family shattered and went off in different directions.
When their beloved Aunt Robbie summons the large, estranged family together for a gathering at their broken-down family cabin on Crooked Lake, instead of getting the answer, Aunt Robbie delivers some devastating news. And by the end of the summer, Avery and Jax learn that the island that’s been a part of their family for generations is going up for sale.
Forced to stay in this string of cabins with their estranged family to get it into shape to sell, Avery and Jax begin to dig through the history of the long-abandoned house and its contents… including a sprinkling of diary pages that were hidden around the island decades ago, the summer their family was torn apart.
In this alternating narrative by bestselling author Erin Soderberg Downing, two cousins are finally beginning to understand the joy of family--however cracked and imperfect theirs might be. But if they have any chance of gluing their broken family back together, they’ll have to first figure out what happened then.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cousins Jax and Avery barely know each other, let alone anything about their extended family—or the incident that led to the brood's estrangement years prior to this book's start. The tweens are also unaware that the family owns an island until their aunt Robbie issues an invitation for everyone to come together at the generations-old cabin on Crooked Lake. Upon arrival, Aunt Robbie reveals that she summoned the family to help her restore the dilapidated property, which she intends to sell. Trapped on Crooked Lake with the squabbling adults—including their own parents and two other aunts—the cousins seek to uncover the secret that tore the four siblings apart. Throughout, Jax and Avery contend with self-image issues stemming from their own fraught nuclear family dynamics. While the pair's inquiry is initially propelled by the possibility of unearthing intriguing generational secrets, they soon learn to love and understand more about their family and themselves. Soderberg Downing (Duck, Duck, Peach) utilizes alternating first-person perspectives to craft a relatable and realistic drama. Descriptions of the adults' childhoods play out across anonymous diary interstitials. The family reads as white. Ages 8–12.
