about the book
Just like her famous nature photographer dad, twelve-year-old Lucy Emory has a passion for taking pictures, but she doesn’t get to spend much time with him sharing their mutual obsession. He is always off to the next big adventurous shoot.
Like now. Once again, he has uprooted the family and, even before they can get all the boxes unloaded from their van, he is off to Arizona for the whole summer.
They left Boston for this run-down cottage on a lake in rural New Hampshire. Lucy doesn’t like to move and she’s sure she’ll never fit in with the kids here. But when she and her dog Ansel go down to the lake to explore, she meets her next-door neighbor, Nate, and the two strike up a quick friendship. Lucy likes his family, especially his Grandmother Lilah.
Lucy and Nate enjoy hiking and kayaking, and Lilah signs them up to monitor her beloved endangered loons and their chicks. Wherever Lucy goes, her camera goes, too. She captures the lake, the four mountains that surround the water, and the loons. Hoping to prove her skills with the camera, she enters a contest judged by her father, submitting the photos under Nate’s name.
Things are going well until Lucy realizes that Grandma Lilah is showing signs of dementia. Hoping to get her close to her beloved loons one last time, Lucy hunts for ways to raise money to get a motorized raft to safely take the elderly woman near the nest. And in a scant moment in time, she captures an unflattering but truly revealing picture of the very confused old lady. Nate is horrified by his grandmother’s panicked expression. He wants no one else to see it.
But her dad, an amazing photographer, once told Lucy that it was important to show the ugly things in life as well as the beautiful ones. Could this photograph win the contest? And will Nate still be her friend if she submits it?
about the author
Cynthia Lord grew up near a lake in New Hampshire and remembers ice-skating in the winter and swimming in the summer. She loved to lie on the pier and daydream about the books she had read.
In high school Cynthia started writing stories. One of her first was a ghost story that gave her nightmares—even though she was the one who wrote it! She also liked to write plays and poems, family newspapers, and short stories.
After she graduated from college, Cynthia got married and started teaching school. She had two children and loved reading to them. As they grew, she started writing fiction again. She wrote her first novel, Rules, about a boy who has autism, because her son also has autism.
Cynthia and her family live near the ocean in Maine. She likes to write in the early mornings, between 3:30 and 4:00 AM, because it is quiet and she can be alone with her stories and her dog.
Sources:
Author website
Author biography : Scholastic
Author interview: Bookish Serendipity
Book Trailer: Half a Chance
Also by Cynthia Lord:
A Handful of Stars. Scholastic. 2015.
Touch Blue. Scholastic. 2010.
Rules. Scholastic. 2006.
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