I love fiction that includes masses of well-researched information. Beth Hautala writes perceptively of grief, while embedding magnificent details of a real place, its culture and wildlife. She affirms the value of storytelling.

Talia’s mother died of cancer and now her father is hauling her away from her New England home to the Arctic, to Churchill, Manitoba, Canada so he can study whales. Not only will he be away from his twelve-year-old daughter, out in the wilderness for six weeks, but Talia will be staying with a woman she doesn’t know. Talia is sad, angry, and confused. My mother died unexpectedly, so I understand many of her feelings and denials.

Fortunately, Sura, the Inuit woman at whose blue-tiled house she’s living, gives Tal her space while cooking comfort foods and being present, but not hovering. Like Talia’s mother, Sura is a storyteller, who shares just the right stories with the grieving girl.

"There is a piece of truth in all stories. Those pieces make stories magic, which is part of the reason the Inuit tell them over and over, generation after generation. The pieces we choose to keep, to make our own, change us. They change the way we live and think, and what we believe. Whichever piece of truth you choose to remember will change how you hear the story. And it will change you, too. It's magic."

One of Sura’s stories is about the unicorn of the sea, the narwhal, that grants wishes. Tal clings to this story because she keeps a jar of wishes that feeds her need for holding onto familiar and hopeful things, however unrealistic they are. She hopes that if she sees a narwhal, her wishes will come true.

“Sura believed mysterious things sometimes happened just because they DID, and that whether or not we ever understood why didn't matter as much as what we did with the mystery. "There's beauty in not having all the answers," she'd said recently. "It makes your heart grow."”

Books and stories have always helped me through difficult times, and heightened my happy times. I love to read stories aloud to both children and adults. Stories connect us and open our hearts to other perspectives.

Talia’s summer is further lightened by the presence of Guitar Boy and the Birdman, a grandson and grandfather living nearby. Simon strolls past the blue house playing his guitar, seizing Talia with his flamboyance. He teaches her the magic of music.

“You can say things through song you can’t say any other way. Songs get inside you and kind of stay there. They remind you of different things. Memories. People.”

The Birdman introduces her to the joys of birdwatching. It is the small Arctic Tern, who migrates the longest distance of any bird, that sways Talia. As the tern plunges and rises each time it dives into the sea for fish to fuel its journeys, so does Talia begin to rise from her grief.

My husband and I are avid birders who revel in their presence wherever we may be. We have surveyed shrubsteppe birds in Oregon and Nevada, studied endangered species in Texas and Oklahoma, counted seabirds in the Pacific Northwest, and traveled to many states, as well as Ireland, Scotland, Costa Rica, Belize, and New Zealand to admire new avifaunas. Birds always lift me out of myself.

Ms. Hautala plunges readers into life in Churchill with vivid, poetic prose of people and place:

“I knew what snow looked like, obviously, but I wasn’t used to the colorful whiteness of everything – the different shades and textures. … the snow was full of colors. If I were a painter, I’d have to use grays and browns, blues, pinks, and yellows in addition to whites to get it right.”

“You look like you grew here," Simon said [to Talia]. "Like you belong here." He carefully untangles a bit of black spruce from my hair. His words hung in the air for a minute like a bird in flight.”

“… the aurora borealis, the northern lights, danced like pale ghost flames above … red and green and white, they shivered and sashayed over the night sky.”

Her descriptions of polar bears and beluga whales, the taiga and the ice; her telling of Inuit stories and science stories, make me want to visit this frigid, dangerous, and beautiful place. If I do go, I will be looking for Sura’s blue-tiled house and the magic of Churchill. And if I don’t, I will be forever grateful to Beth Hautala for taking me there with her inspiring and lyrical story. ( )