Finding Esme

Three months after 12-year-old Esme McCauley’s grandfather dies while digging on Solace Hill, Esme discovers dinosaur bones under his tractor at that very place. No one knows what Paps was looking for that day, and if anyone did, they wouldn’t say. Esme feels alone among her absent family members. Her tough grandmother, Bee, cares for the family, which faces the foreclosure of their struggling Texas peach farm; her father, Harlan, disappeared years earlier; and her mother, June Rain, has “been in a bad spell as long as a Texas drought.” When a professor arrives to investigate the bones, Esme worries that he’ll take away the one thing that makes her life special, but he opens her eyes to paleontology as an exciting field of study and to the idea of a future outside of the small town. Crowley (The Stolen One) creates a believable small-town Texas setting, but the plot circles rather than advances—side tales about townspeople seem unrelated, as does a thread about the family’s ability to find missing things. Ages 8–12. [em](Aug.) [/em]