Starting a new life after the death of her mother, Nora learns how to be strong.
Are there wounds too deep to heal, pains too sharp to share? And if a family survives by cutting the ties that bind them, can they ever be whole again?
After losing her mother to illness and her father to his work, Nora Mackenzie must leave her home in the interior of B.C. for a North Vancouver school. Estranged from her classmates, her family, and the life she's lost, Nora walls herself off from the people around her. At the same time, her young cousin Lizzie is facing an uncertain future as one of the first children to undergo open-heart surgery. As the operation approaches, Nora discovers that she is not the only person in her family isolated by fear and grief.
1 of 1 copy available
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
September 10, 2014 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781459710542
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781459710542
- File size: 866 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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October 1, 2014
Gr 6 Up-Twelve-year-old Nora is growing up in 1959 Canada. After the death of her mother and a move to a new city, she is grieving and lonely. It doesn't help matters that her cousin Lizzie is in need of a risky operation to fix a hole in her heart, and the outcome is uncertain. In spite of her sullenness, however, Nora eventually finds a baby-sitting job, gets involved in the school play, and helps out a classmate whose father does "dirty" or "bad" things to her, and uses her mother as a "punching bag." When Lizzie and her family come to stay so that Lizzie can have her surgery at the local hospital, the crisis helps to draw them all together and heal wounds physical and metaphorical. Nora eventually tells an adult about her friend's abusive father and the girl is taken out of the harmful environment. The interesting setting might help readers look past Nora's initial prickliness and root for her as she finds her place in a new home, though some of the darker subplots may prove troubling for some.-Laurie Slagenwhite Walters, Brighton District Library, Brighton, MI
Copyright 2014 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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