"Cathleen Young's characters will forever have a place in my heart." --Holly Goldberg Sloan, author of Counting by 7s Former best friends compete to see who can grow the biggest pumpkin and win the annual giant pumpkin race on the lake. A great pick for fans of Half a Chance and Gertie's Leap to Greatness . At the end of every summer, Madeline Island hosts its famous pumpkin race. All summer, adults and kids across the island grow giant, thousand-pound pumpkins, then hollow one out and paddle in it across the lake to the cheers of the entire town. Twelve-year-old Billie loves to win; she has a bulletin board overflowing with first-prize ribbons. Her best friend Sam doesn't care much about winning, or at least Billie didn't think so until last summer's race, when his pumpkin crashed into hers as she was about to cross the finish line and he won. This summer, Billie is determined to get revenge by growing the best and biggest pumpkin and beating Sam in the race. It's a tricky science to grow pumpkins, since weather, bugs, and critters can wipe out a crop. Then a surprise visit from a long-lost relative shakes things up, and Billie begins to see her family, and her bond with Sam, in a new way. "Madeline Island provides a lush setting . . . The details of Billie's everyday life . . . are evocatively described. Billie herself is a refreshingly flawed character with lots of room to grow and change. A compelling coming-of-age story." -- Booklist "A refreshingly bold female middle-school protagonist. . . . Madeline Island is the picture of idyllic pastoral life, making this an easy pick for fans of quaint small-town drama." -- The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books Like Billie, Cathleen Young grew up fishing on lakes with her father. After writing for magazines and serving a stint as a police reporter, she started writing for television, everything from soap operas to shows like Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman and MacGyver. She has over a dozen television movies to her credit, including the award-winning A Place for Annie. A former recipient of the Humanitas Prize, Young is now the executive director of Humanitas, where she launches up-and-coming television writers. She lives in Santa Monica with her twin daughters and her husband. Visit her online at CathleenYoungBooks.com and on Twitter at @CathleenWrites. I watched Sam through my binoculars as he planted his pumpkin seedlings. He looked like a two-legged bug I could squash with my thumb. I climbed higher through a web of tangled branches and emerald-green leaves smeared with sunlight, my binoculars swinging from a braided lanyard around my neck. My head popped into open sky. I could see my whole world from up here. Our house looked like a wooden bird that had crashed into the hillside. My dad built it with his own hands before I was born. He says our house is “in harmony with nature.” I say it’s weird to have a closet hacked from brownstone and a tiny trickle of a stream cutting through the middle of our kitchen during the rainy season. Up the hill from my house, at the end of a skinny dirt footpath, I spotted my beehives, a row of white wooden boxes stacked like suitcases. I love my bees. They turn the world into a taste. When I stick my finger into a fresh comb bursting with honey, I can taste the globe mallows that tickle my neck when my little sister and I lie sprawled on our backs behind the barn, eating sticky jelly beans from my secret stash, and I can smell the purple lupine that explodes across the fields around my house after a spring thunderstorm. I swear I can even feel the cool breeze hitting the brittlebush in the heat of summer. Sam says that’s impossible, that it’s just my overactive imagination at work. What does he know. I could see my half-built tree house stuck in a towering pine tree and our gray barn slouched next to the feed shed. Our water tank looked like a fat red Tootsie Roll stuck in the middle of the meadow that rolls down from our farm to Chequamegon Bay. Pronounced she-wah-me-gan. The bay used to be called Zhaagawaamikong. It was named by the Ojibwe, who lived here first until we stole their land. I guess I shouldn’t say we, since I’m half Ojibwe from my mom’s side. My dad is Irish. When I look in the mirror, I see his red hair and green eyes. The wind kicked up, and whitecaps skittered across the bay. I raised my binoculars and scanned the horizon until I spotted my dad’s fishing boat, her bow riding low with his haul of whitefish. He named his boat Niinimooshe for my mom, to honor her heritage. Niinimooshe means “sweetheart” in Ojibwe. My mom thinks that’s romantic. If she spent as much time on that stinky boat as I did, she might not think so. I swung my binoculars back toward land and found Sam, still planting his seedlings. All of a sudden he looked up and smiled in my direction. I ducked into the leaves as a prickly heat crawled up my neck and across my face. Sam used to be my best fr