The Wide Starlight

Produktbeschreibung

The Hazel Wood meets The Astonishing Color of After in this dreamy, atmospheric novel that follows sixteen-year-old Eli as she tries to remember what truly happened the night her mother disappeared off a frozen fjord in Norway under the Northern Lights.

According to Arctic lore, if you whistle at the Northern Lights, they'll swoop down and carry you off forever. Sixteen-year-old Eline Davis knows it's true because it happened to her mother. Eli was there that night on the remote glacier in Svalbard, when her mother whistled, then vanished.

Years later, Eli is living with her dad on Cape Cod. When Eli discovers the Northern Lights will be visible for one night on the Cape, she hatches a plan to use the lights to contact her missing mother. And it works. Her mother arrives with a hazy story of where she's been all this time. Eli knows no one will believe them, so she keeps it all a secret. But when magical, dangerous things start happening--narwhals appearing in Cape Cod Bay, meteorites landing in the yard, three shadowy fairytale princesses whispering ominous messages--the secrets start to become more like lies.

It's all too much, too fast, and Eli pushes her mother away, not expecting her to disappear as abruptly as she appeared. Her mother's gone again, and Eli's devastated. Until she finds the note written in mother's elegant scrawl: Find me where I left you. And so, off to Svalbard Eli goes. 

Kritik

A Junior Library Guild Selection
A Kirkus Best Book of 2021
A 2021 Massachusetts Book Award Must-Read Book

"With her vividly rendered settings, emotionally complex characters, and sweet and sinister magical realism, Lesperance may be a promising successor to Alice Hoffman...[The Wide Starlight is] sharp and snow-dusted yet strangely cozy; a comforting winter's read." Kirkus, starred review

"A lovely exploration of grief and the way stories shape our lives and how reshaping stories can have consequences. The pages fly by as Lesperance s compelling voice and masterful switching between present-day narrative and fairy-tale past smoothly build a portrait of intergenerational love, loss, and magic rooted in a glittering Arctic landscape." BCCB, starred review

"This mesmerizing and sometimes heartbreaking fantasy reveals the complicated relationships between mothers and daughters...A haunting contemporary fantasy." School Library Journal

"Lesperance weaves the myth and magic of Norwegian folklore into a realistic setting in this wintry tale of a teen searching for her long-lost mother...an emotionally complex tale of the love between mothers and daughters that balances between ominous and cozy." Booklist

"[A] promising debut." Publishers Weekly

Poetic and richly imagined, The Wide Starlight is a spell-binding journey through a world of Nordic fairytale the heart-wrenching story of a teenage girl and her quest to reclaim and understand the mother who abandoned her. Edith Patou, award-winning author of East and West

"Nicole Lesperance blends crystalline prose, an atmospheric setting and memorable characters to create a story that dances and shines as brightly as the northern lights in her debut YA novel, The Wide Starlight." BookPage

A Junior Library Guild Selection 

Autoreninfo

Nicole Lesperance grew up on Cape Cod and graduated from Wesleyan University. She spent a few years in London and now lives near Boston with her husband, two kids, and two rambunctious black cats. She writes YA and middle grade books. Follow her on Twitter @niclesperance or visit her online at NicoleLesperance.