What the Tide Brings

The tower is empty. The door is locked. You don't go there.

Everyone in the village knows all three things. All three are wrong.

On the night of the worst storm of the season, a boy runs out of his house carrying something too heavy to name - a sick sister, a slammed door, and a sentence he'd give anything to take back. The storm catches him at the dark end of the forbidden beach, where the only shelter is the old wooden lighthouse on the point.

But the path to its red door is worn smooth by feet, on a point where nobody goes. And inside, by a driftwood fire that burns sea-green at the edges, an old woman is waiting with hot chocolate and no questions at all.

The kettle was singing before he knocked.

He's there until the tide turns. That's four stories, the way she tells them - one for each turn of the wind:

A boy who dug up the wrong treasure, and learned what the market's scales can never weigh. A girl who met the merriest creature in the Mediterranean, and learned that joy is a skill, not a mood. A girl who signaled a dark lighthouse for nine nights, certain no one was watching - and was counted, every night. And last, as the tide turns, a girl who built a dragon out of sand - and what the sea did, and what she did about what the sea did.

Each story is stranger than the last. Each one takes something off the boy's shoulders. And each one has left something behind in the tower - a whittled bird in a jam jar, a blue stone worn smooth, a small sand dragon that he could swear just moved - because stories, the keeper says, go solid at the edges if you tend them long enough.

By morning, the storm will pass. The tide will give the beach road back.

And the boy will walk home carrying two things: one for his sister, and one that was never for him at all.

What the Tide Brings gathers the complete Shore Shelf - including the beloved The Sand Dragon, and three tales found nowhere else - inside the story of one storm, one tower, and one keeper who tells each child exactly the stories they need before the tide turns.

For readers 7 to 107. Best read aloud, near water, with the kettle on.