Sea Change

Cold ocean waves. Fried tongue and onions for dinner. Up at 4:30 in the morning to shovel lobster chum into a bucket. "You'll love it!" Eliot's mom promises while bundling him off to spend a summer with relatives on Point Aconi, Nova Scotia. He doesn't at first—at all!—but you won't be surprised that by the end of his twelve-year-old summer in that tiny fishing town he's grown into a person he can hardly recognize, and one who's sad to leave. Eliot's coming of age may be familiar, but it's believable and moving, and the inventive layout of the book and Viva's illustrations, which you may recognize from his picture books and New Yorker covers, give his story the brisk freshness of a cannonball into the North Atlantic. (Ages 8 to 13)