The Blue Bottle to be Published This Summer

I’m excited to announce that my middle-grade novel, The Blue Bottle, will be published sometime this summer by North Country Press. We are currently working on final edits of the manuscript, cover art and a few last-minute details.

The book, an adventure story for readers age 8 to 14, is set in Rocky Harbor, a fictional fishing village on Massachusetts’ Cape Ann. The Blue Bottle tells the story of 13-year-old Charlotte Hale, the granddaughter of an aging lobsterman, who has been sent to stay for the summer with her grandparents after a less-than-successful school year. On the bus ride to Rocky Harbor Charlotte meets an eccentric retired teacher who tells her the story of the blue bottle, a local legend that leads her on a high-stakes quest for an ancient glass bottle reputed to hold within it all the power of the oceans.

Charlotte battles a malevolent sea god posing as an antiques dealer and rotten-smelling eels that can grow legs and walk on land. In the midst of it all, she must come to grips with her divorced parents’ new lives, a painful task that becomes more difficult when she learns of her father’s plans to remarry and her mother’s wish that she and her brother, Charles, live anywhere but with her and her new family.

With the help of her new friend Ezra, a magic mirror, a computer geek named Edward and a 400-year-old mermaid named Eucla who lives in the cove behind her grandparents’ house, Charlotte races against time to find the blue bottle and return it to its rightful owner before the village of Rocky Harbor crashes into the ocean.

Check back soon for the book cover reveal, publication date and pre-order information.