Sea-Fever

From Newbery Honor and Scott O’Dell Award–winner Lauren Wolk comes a poignant exploration of loss with a dash of magical realism about a runaway orphan who finds the home she never knew she had.

Josephine hadn’t planned to run away. But when she stumbles upon a lost wallet with a bus ticket to the northern tip of Maine tucked inside, she knows it’s her chance to find somewhere new. Somewhere that’s not Portland. Somewhere she’s not a foster kid. Somewhere that can be a true home.

Carrying only a small knapsack containing everything important, every memory of life before her mother died, Josephine arrives in a swath of isolated wilderness dotted by a small collection of vacation homes. On a hill between the forest and the sea, one house beckons. Peering through the window, Josephine is surprised to spy a seagull. Oddly at home in the old cottage, the bird seems to be inviting her inside.

The empty house seems haunted by grief that feels just like her own. But there is something more about the place than a kinship of pain—something familiar.