August Isle by Ali Standish (review)

August Isle seems like the perfect place to spend a summer, and it would be if twelve-year-old Miranda wasn't stuck there while her ever-distant mother travels away on yet another photography trip. Miranda has to stay with Aunt Clare (actually Mom's friend) and her daughter Sameera; something's fishy about Mom's deliberate obfuscation of her youth at August Isle, so Miranda and Sameera resort to sleuthing to solve Mom's big secret. Things escalate after Miranda breaks into a supposedly deserted house and has to transcribe stories from an retired world-traveler as penance, and one of his stories—a tragic one—may hold the key to Mom's evasiveness and detachment. Standish loads her prose with well-written turns of phrase that realistically relay Miranda's emotions. The kids' summery adventures, from sailing lessons to pie-baking contests, necessarily provide some relief for readers before the tragic secret is revealed. Furthermore, identity crises thematically linger with each character, as Sameera juggles being not Indian enough for her family and not American enough for her friends, Miranda learns to improve herself for her sake and not her mother's, and adults shape themselves around past traumas. Though Miranda's mother's excuse for bad parenting is flimsy and some of the characters could be more fleshed out, Standish still constructs a subtly powerful story about acknowledging the past while defining oneself outside of it. NB