For 2025 Newbery Honor author Lauren Wolk (Wolf Hollow) offers a story about a precocious twelve year old, Lucretia Sanderson and her struggle to find friendship and community on Candle Island where she and her mother have come to live after the death of Lucretia’s father. Lucretia finds secrets, six secrets she says at the beginning of the book, on Candle Island, and she’s not sure she can manage to fit in with the islanders or deal with the rude, entitled summer people. Nevertheless, independent-minded Lucretia is determined to carve out her own place on the island and continue to follow her vocation as an artist, whether anyone likes her or believes in her or not.

This novel has Newbery contender written all over it. (I said the same in my review of Beyond the Bright Sea, one of Lauren Wolk’s previous books.) The writing, descriptive and lyrical, and the setting, an island off the coast of Maine, both reminded me of Gary B. Schmidt (The Wednesday Wars and Okay for Now) and of Katherine Paterson (Jacob Have I Loved). Lucretia is a child with a deep inner life, and she and her new friends (or enemies?) on the island, Murdock and Bastian, are almost too talented and mature to be believable. But that’s one of the points of the story, take it or leave it: that adults should have more respect for children who are gifted beyond their years.

Another issue in the story is the enmity between the summer kids, only on the island for summer vacation, and the islanders, who live on Candle Island year round. The summer teens are rich, rude, and possibly delinquents, while the islander are prickly, working class, and insular. This rift makes for a volatile dynamic as Lucretia attempts to become a part of the island community while also remaining true to the Quaker suffragette, Lucretia Mott, from whom her name is taken.

This story is also for animal lovers. Lucretia brings several animals to the new island home where she and her mother live, including an injured osprey that Lucretia is determined to rehabilitate and then set free. The complication is that ospreys are a protected species, and the law mandates that any injured bird found is supposed to be reported to authorities. So Lucretia’s responsibility to care for the osprey with the understanding that it must eventually go free is another conflict to be resolved over the course of the novel.

I really enjoyed reading Candle Island. Some of the minor characters are underdeveloped; the summer kids are all bad, all the time, spoiled rotten. But Lucretia and her new islander friends are full and interesting characters, and the story is about them, especially Lucretia, not about the summer vacationers. I’ve read three of Ms. Wolk’s other middle grade novels—Wolf Hollow, Beyond the Bright Sea, and Echo Mountain—and appreciated all of them. However, Candle Island is my favorite of her novels so far.