By Kate Allen
A girl finishes her late mother's shark research the same summer she loses her best friend, and finds a way to hold both losses at once.
Lucy Everhart is almost thirteen, drawing her way through a hot Massachusetts summer with her best friend Fred, when a great white shark turns up in the harbor. Her mother was a marine biologist who died years ago with her shark research unfinished, and the shark tugs Lucy back toward her mother's old notebooks and questions. Then, partway through the summer, Fred drowns in a flooded quarry. With her rescue-diver father and a handful of kind, slightly odd grown-ups from town, Lucy starts sorting the notebooks, tracking shark sightings up and down the coast, and piecing together the study her mother never got to finish.
This is one of the longer, more grown-up books on the trail, and it asks a lot: your child has to carry two losses at once and sit in a good deal of feeling between them. It gives a lot back, too. The shark science is real and genuinely interesting, the seaside town feels lived-in, and the bond between Lucy and her diver father is warm without ever going tidy. For an older, steady reader who loves the ocean or science, watching Lucy pour her grief into her mother's unfinished work is the part that stays with you. The book takes its time with her and doesn't pretend the sadness is smaller than it is.