Baby by Patricia MacLachlan
#43 in my reading challenge for the year, and #19 in my summer reading challenge, was Baby by Patricia MacLachlan, a recommendation from Michael Cart’s interesting history of YA literature, From Romance to Realism. Baby is a bittersweet, spare story of a vacation island family that takes in a child left at their door at the end of the season. As the story unfolds, we learn the sadness that lurks for each of the family members. This has beautiful prose, memorable characters, and challenging ruminations on loss and memory. Short, powerful, and emotional.