22 May 2025 CANDLE ISLAND by Lauren Wolk, Penguin Random House/Dutton, April 2025, 352p., ISBN: 978-0-593-69854-9

“I think I'm gonna love it

I think I'm gonna love it

Because I know someday someone else will see it my way

And then I'll know I was not wrong

I know they won't believe it

I know they won't believe it

They think that I'm no good

But I will make myself understood

'Cause I believe it all along”

– Todd Rundgren, “Saving Grace” (1972)

“Six mysteries waited for me on Candle Island.

One involved a bird.

The second, a hidden room.

A song the third.

A poet the fourth

A cat fifth.

A fire sixth.

Each of them exciting in its own way.

But none more interesting than the mystery I took there with me.”

– the Prologue

“‘I’m Lucretia,’ I said, holding out my hand, which he took after a thoughtful moment.

‘Lucretia. Unusual.’

‘I was named for a warrior, too. A Quaker warrior.’

He lifted his brows. ‘Now, there’s an oxymoron. I thought Quakers were peaceful folks.’

The oxymoron made me smile. I liked a well-schooled tongue.

‘Lots of ways to fight,’ I said.”

Twelve-year-old Lucretia (Lucy) Sanderson, (named for Lucretia Mott), had a bright, loving, and compassionate father. But his vehicle encountered a patch of black ice near their Vermont home, and now he is dead.

Lucretia and her mom decide to restart their broken life on a small island off of the Maine coast. Accompanying them is their beloved horse, “Hog” (Mahogany).

Both mother and daughter are painters:

“Painting made both of us feel happy and complete. Painting helped both of us fill up our empty places. 

But other people looked at us through two different lenses.

They saw my mother as a successful artist, but they had always told me that I was doing things wrong. Even when I was a little kid. 

Before I entered kindergarten, the people at the school gave me a test to see ‘what I could do.’

‘Draw a family,’ they told me, so that’s what I drew. A family of plums, with pudgy bodies and sweet faces, complete with eyelashes and dimples and hair made of leaves.

‘She failed the test,’ the people told my parents. ‘She was supposed to draw something like this.’ They held up a picture drawn by one of the other children. In it, three stick figures stood outside a square house with a triangle roof under a round yellow sun. The stick figures all had legs and arms and fingers and heads and enormous, terrifying smiles.

‘But what’s wrong with what Lucy drew?’ my mother asked, half sad, half angry.

Later, in the early grades, my art teachers all insisted I was being willful. Stubborn. Difficult. ‘She won’t follow directions,’ they told my mother. ‘Her colors are all wrong.’ They even tested me for color blindness. 

And then, when I was eight, a small cultural center not far from where we lived invited local artists to submit work for a spring exhibit.

My mother took two of her paintings and two of mine. 

She submitted all four of them as Sandersons. Nothing more.

All four were accepted into the show.

The man who ran the cultural center called my mother to tell her the good news.

‘Your watercolors are charming,’ he said, and your oils are really quite…interesting. We love their nontraditional use of color and how they combine abstraction and realism.

‘Thank you,’ my mother said as I stood close by the telephone, listening in. ‘But those are my daughter’s. Mine are the watercolors.’

On the other end of the line, silence.

Then, ‘’How old is your daughter?’

‘She’s eight,’ my mother said.

More silence.

‘Well, we would love to have her in our youth exhibit in July,’ the man said. ‘But I’m afraid that this exhibit is for adults only.’

My mother looked at me; I looked at her.

‘I’ll come by tomorrow to pick up all four,’ she replied.”

So we learn from square one that Lucy has a mom who really stands by her daughter. We are not surprised that, when Lucy discovers a somehow-orphaned osprey chick (See #1 of the six mysteries list, up top.), her mother is accepting of Lucy’s desire to foster the chick Lucy names Gulliver (initially thinking he was a seagull hatchling), until he can fend for himself.

Literally, from the moment they first reach Candle Island by ferry, Lucy encounters multiple complications and conflicts with her peers, both the permanent resident “townies” and the summer people’s kids. Bullying is a significant issue in the story.

CANDLE ISLAND is a good-as-it-gets coming-of-age tale filled with characters–both human and animal–who will be living in me for some time to come. It features beautiful coastal Maine settings. It also features a seemingly endless stream of Ms. Wolk’s stunningly descriptive metaphors and similes that are as beautiful as that rugged coast.

This is one of those books that is going to change a life, a book in which some misunderstood reader will take refuge and find himself or herself. 

I will stop there. Whether you read it now, or read it after it wins some big awards down the road, I don’t want to reveal the many surprises awaiting readers. (See the six mysteries list, above.) CANDLE ISLAND is THE read not to miss in 2025.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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