The Chronicles of Stinky Cove · Book 6

January

The Owl Who Came From Away

The bird was in the wrong place. So was the girl. Only one of them knew it.

A snowy owl hatched a thousand miles north comes down onto the barrens above Halftide in December because it is the only flat thing on the coast. She has nine words for the color of light and none for spruce, road or dog, and she sits in the open and does not move while sixteen crows spend an hour and a quarter explaining that nobody sits there.

Margo Ouellette is eleven, new to the barrens road from a mill city in Massachusetts, and what she cannot stand about Halftide is not the cold. It is that everybody keeps being kind at her. She has turned the wildlife club down twice. She finds the owl in December, stands in the road for eleven minutes, and tells nobody.

Then the cars with the long lenses arrive, and a wren with the loudest voice in the county decides the whole thing is his business.