The Summer of Blue Glass

Sixteen-year-old Nora Vale expects the summer at her grandmother’s old house in Port Marrow to be quiet, dusty, and painfully slow. Her mother calls it “a chance to rest.” Nora calls it exile.

But Grandmother Elsie’s house is not the sleepy place Nora remembers from childhood. The walls hold locked rooms, the attic hides boxes no one mentions, and the tide keeps bringing strange pieces of blue glass to the shore. As Nora learns the rhythms of the marsh, the market, and her grandmother’s small circle of neighbors, she begins to uncover a story her family has spent years avoiding.

There was once another girl in the Vale family. A girl who painted the sea. A girl who left behind letters, songs, and questions. As Nora follows the clues, she discovers that growing up sometimes means understanding that adults are not finished people. They carry fear, hope, mistakes, and love in equal measure.

By the end of the summer, Nora must decide what kind of truth matters most: the truth that breaks silence, or the truth that helps a family begin again.