A moving portrait of loss and the restorative power of art from Lauren Wolk, the Newbery Honor-winning author of Beyond the Bright Sea . Lucretia Sanderson has a secret. Lucretia and her mother have come to tiny Candle Island, Maine (Population: Summer, 986; Winter, 315) to escape—escape memories of the car accident that killed her father and escape the journalists that hound her mother, a famous and reclusive artist. The rocky coast and ocean breeze are a welcome respite for Lucretia, who dedicates her summer days to painting, exploring the island, and caring for an orphaned osprey chick. But Candle Island has secrets of its own—a hidden room in her new house, a mysterious boy with a beautiful voice—and just like the strong tides that surround the shores, they will catch Lucretia in their wake. With an unforgettable New England setting and a complex web of relationships old and new, Candle Island is a powerful story about art, loss, and the power of being true to your own voice. Lauren Wolk is an award–winning poet, artist, and novelist. She is the author of Echo Mountain , My Own Lightning , Newbery Honor–winner Wolf Hollow , and Scott O’Dell Award-winner Beyond the Bright Sea . Lauren was born in Baltimore and has since lived in California, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Canada, and Ohio. She now lives with her family on Cape Cod. We arrived on a Sunday morning. On any other day of the week, the islanders would have been lobstering, and I would have been spared the dubious welcome I got as our ferry nosed into port. I stood at the rail and watched a passel of big kids clustered on the end of an old black wharf that sagged and tilted with age and effort. They wore wet cut-offs and T-shirts and were a bit blue from an ocean that would still be cold in August but was truly frigid on that June Sunday. All around them, yachts on moorings drizzled their reflections onto the sea. Many were motorboats, but there were a few sailboats, too, most of them white, with names and home ports painted across their sterns. The Commodore out of Jekyll Island. Poseidon from Myrtle Beach. Leviathan from Sag Harbor. Just beyond the old wharf where the kids perched, a newer marina with a fueling station reached out into the harbor, smaller boats tucked into slips all along it. Whalers, mostly. A couple of Starcraft. Boats for puttering around the bays and inlets. Nothing meant for big water. Still farther down the shore, a dozen brawny lobster boats in carnival colors rode their own moorings near a fish pier. “Hey, New York!” someone yelled. One of the kids. A girl, maybe thirteen. She was staring straight at me, so I reckoned she thought I was a New Yorker. Or perhaps that was just her way of saying stranger . I didn’t know what she wanted, so I didn’t know how to respond except to raise a flat hand, palm out, which could have meant either hello or stop. In reply, she launched herself off her perch, high into the air, wrapped her arms around her tucked legs, and cannonballed into the sea. Her splash reached a gleaming motorboat anchored nearby. It was a cabin cruiser, big enough to motor down to Boston in a single day. A woman sitting in the stern with a coffee cup and a newspaper leaped to her feet, shrieking, and most of the kids laughed. I watched as the girl climbed back up a ladder fixed to the wharf. Her smirk was for the woman in the cruiser. And for me, too. I hadn’t even set foot on the island yet, and I already knew I wasn’t welcome. “Pay no attention to Murdock,” said a man who’d suddenly appeared at the rail alongside me in old jeans and a canvas jacket, wild white hair, skin like tree bark. “She’s a show-off.” I squinted up at him. “Murdock?” “It means sea , protector of the sea , sea warrior . Take your pick. Her father chose it for sea warrior. He was counting on a boy. But he stuck with the name when she showed up instead.” We both pondered that as the deckhands below us tied the ferry to its berth with ropes as thick as my arm. “You here for the summer?” He dropped all of his caboose r ’s—the ones at the ends of his words—so here came out he-yah and summer came out summah . “Here for good,” I replied. “My mother and I.” I could see questions in his eyes, but he didn’t ask them. Perhaps he could see the answers in mine. “I’m Lucretia,” I said, holding out my hand, which he took after a thoughtful moment. “Lucretia. Unusual.” “I was named for a warrior, too. A Quaker warrior.” He lifted his brows. “Now, there’s an oxymoron. I thought Quakers were peaceful folks.” The oxymoron made me smile. I liked a well-schooled tongue. “Lots of ways to fight,” I said. He nodded. “Ayuh. That’s so. I’m Big Seb Kelly. I run the boatyard over there.” The there came out in two syllables: they-ah . He nodded toward a cluster of outbuildings whose shingles had curled and darkened in the salt air. “You’re not that big,” I said, measuring him with my eyes. He smiled in a way that ma