Waiting for Unicorns by Beth Hautala (review)

In the wake of her mother’s death from cancer, twelve-year-old Talia is forced to spend the summer in the Arctic as her whale-researcher father heads out to study belugas. Churchill, Manitoba, is a small, secluded town, but it’s also the place where her parents met, and Sura, an Inuit friend of Tal’s mom, offers Tal a picture of her mother—young, carefree—that Tal has never seen before. A visiting ornithologist and his grandson also offer some insight and wisdom on grief and loss, and as Tal awaits her father’s return, her emotions thaw with the summer melt and she’s finally ready to close the “Mom-sized space” that has distanced her from her father, who has shut himself off with grief. Tal’s matter-of-fact narration of her mother’s death through flashbacks and memories has a raw simplicity to it, and her pain is evident both in the things she chooses to tell as well those she chooses to omit. While the secondary cast mainly serves as a vehicle for Tal’s healing, her process rings with authenticity—several heart-to-heart talks with her father, for example, are followed by both of them returning to their old, isolating habits, and it’s clear that their recovery will include a realistic amount of fits and starts. Hautala mines the frigid setting for some exquisitely wrought metaphors of sadness and grief, and Tal’s reflections on her situation are lyrical and yet still appropriate, given her age. Readers who were touched by Holly Goldberg Sloan’s Counting by 7s (BCCB 9/13) will find this to be a similarly moving tale.