For fans of If He'd Been With Me and The Quiet Part Out Loud, a heartfelt and heartbreaking novel about endings and new beginnings.
Seventeen-year-old Susanna runs. Too much, if you ask her mother. She's at loose ends in Brooklyn; her best friend has moved away, her parents might be getting a divorce, and the only time she feels any peace is when her feet strike the pavement. She's less than excited to find out that she'll be joining her mom's two-month documentary research trip to the Arctic Circle. Not quite the change of pace she's looking for.
But Susanna's summer outlook abruptly changes when the film crew discovers a family living in the remotest reaches of the Northern Canadian wilderness. They've lived cut off from civilization for over twenty years, meaning that Benjamin-eighteen, with blue eyes and a smile as warm as the sun-has never known another life. He's a runner, too, and when he and Susanna meet, they strike up an unlikely friendship.
Benjamin's existence has always been isolated, but together under the never-setting midnight sun, he and Susanna begin to imagine his life somewhere else. Somewhere together. But when tragedy strikes, Susanna is left with the pieces of what could have been-and the bittersweet realization that she had to go thousands of miles to find what was there all along.