By Sarah Guillory
A girl in rural Louisiana waits for her dad to come home after a mine collapse, and pins her hope on a lonely egg she finds and decides to protect.
Twelve-year-old Evan Calais lives for the outdoors, fishing and running mud fights around her small island town in Louisiana, with its cranes and marsh water. Then a sinkhole collapses the town mine with forty-eight miners trapped inside, and her father is one of them. While everyone waits for word that doesn't come, Evan slips away to the water and finds a large egg, alone and abandoned. She takes it on herself to keep it warm and safe, hiding it from the grown-ups and tending it through the long, uncertain days of not knowing.
This is a tender, nature-soaked story for a child who feels things deeply and loves an animal at the heart of a book. It's about the kind of magical bargain a child makes when something is out of their hands, if I do this one thing right, the person I love will be okay. Guillory writes it with a lot of heart and a real sense of place, the mud and water and cranes of rural Louisiana, and it reads beautifully aloud. It's honest about how scary the waiting is, and it never leaves your child without hope to hold.