Beyond the Bright Sea

Twelve-year-old Crow has spent her whole life on a tiny island in the Elizabeth Islands off the Massachusetts coast, where she drifted ashore in a small boat when she was only hours old. She has been raised by Osh, the quiet painter who found her, with help from Miss Maggie, their neighbor across the sandbar. Some people on the nearby islands keep their distance, suspecting she came from Penikese, an island that housed a colony for people with leprosy. When Crow sees a fire burning on Penikese one night, she sets out to learn who her parents were, and the search leads to buried family history and real danger. Lauren Wolk's novel, set in the 1920s, won the 2018 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction.