One month ago, 16-year-old Jamie left Bible Hill, Nova Scotia, to earn a living playing the fiddle in Halifax. Noah\u2019s parents spend their evenings driving to Halifax to look for Jamie, so Noah\u2019s grandmother arrives from Cape Breton Island, soothing Noah with warm hugs, serving him chocolate cake for breakfast, and tending to his cold with home remedies. Unlike wild child Jamie, whose exploits are legendary, \u201cgood kid\u201d Noah excels academically and swims competitively, but he feels overlooked\u2014and lonely. New girl Alysha Toussaint befriends him, but Noah is hurt when Alysha and Jessica, Noah\u2019s swimming rival and sometime bully, become romantically involved. Noah\u2019s conflicts all come to a head when he sets out alone to look for Jamie, bringing the tale to a poignant conclusion. Balancing the larger issue of Jamie\u2019s disappearance with Noah\u2019s need for normalcy and longing for friendship, Schwartz Fagan\u2019s well-paced narrative convincingly portrays the anxiety of a family dealing with crisis, the pleasures of having a loving grandparent, and the typical\u2014yet still excruciating\u2014ups and downs of adolescence. The maritime province\u2019s small-town setting adds flavor and dimension, with lyrics from traditional East Coast Canadian songs interspersed. Most characters read white; Alysha\u2019s last name hints at diversity.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
One month ago, 16-year-old Jamie left Bible Hill, Nova Scotia, to earn a living playing the fiddle in Halifax. Noah\u2019s parents spend their evenings driving to Halifax to look for Jamie, so Noah\u2019s grandmother arrives from Cape Breton Island, soothing Noah with warm hugs, serving him chocolate cake for breakfast, and tending to his cold […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5851,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5851"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}