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The Notebook meets Love & Gelato in this heart-wrenching novel full of deep romance and searing tragedy (Kirkus Reviews) about a teen girl who travels to her late mothers majestic summertime home to learn of the romanceand the tragedythat changed her life forever.

Seventeen-year-old Lexi has always wanted to know more about the mother who passed away when she was only a child. But her dad will barely talk about her. He says hed rather live in the present with Lexi, her stepmom, and her half-brother. Lexi loves her family, too, but is it so wrong to want to learn about the mom she never got to know?

When Lexis grandma dies and secretly leaves her a worn blue chest that belonged to Lexis mother, Lexi is ecstatic to find a treasure trove of keepsakes. Her mom held onto letters, pamphlets, flyers, and news articles all from the same beautiful summertime getaway: Mackinac Islandplus a cryptic postcard that hints at a forbidden romance. If Lexi wants answers, this island is where she needs to go.

Without telling her dad, Lexi goes to the gorgeous Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, reachable only by ferry. Cars are forbidden and bikes are the number one mode of transportation along the quaint cobblestone streets, and the magical hotel that rests alongside cozy cafés and bookshops. While following her mothers footsteps, Lexi befriends an elderly former Broadway star and a charming young hotel worker while quickly falling in love with her surroundings.

But though the island may be beautiful, its hiding unfortunate secretssome with her mother at the center. Could some questions be best left buried beneath the blue waters?

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Longlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize 2023. Winner of the Poetry Category OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2022. An Irish Times Best Poetry Books of 2021. A White Review Book of the Year 2021. Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in a village in central Jamaica. 'Trees were all around,' he writes, 'we often went to the yam ground, my grandmother's cultivation plot. When I think of my childhood, I see myself entering a deep woodland with cedars and logwood all around. [...] The muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived.' Now he lives in Leeds, near a forest where he goes walking. 'Here, trees represent an alternative space, a refuge from an ultra-consumerist culture...' And even as they help him recover his connections with nature, these poems are inevitably political. As Malika Booker writes, 'Allen-Paisant's poetic ruminations deceptively radicalise Wordsworth's pastoral scenic daffodils. The collection racializes contemporary ecological poetics and its power lies in Allen-Paisant's subtle destabilization of the ordinary dog walker's right to space, territory, property and leisure by positioning the colonised Black male body's complicated and unsafe reality in these spaces.'