The Girl Who Drove the Drawbridge

About this book:

Twelve-year-old Pip Berry doesn't spend her summers at the beach—she spends them forty feet above the Gut, greasing the massive gears of a 1938 heel-trunnion bascule bridge alongside her grandfather, the only man in thirty miles who can coax a bevel gear back to life without calling an engineer from Portland. On Skiff Island, the bridge isn't infrastructure; it's a heartbeat. It's the only road for ambulances and fuel trucks, the only gate for trawlers hauling iced redfish to the back bay, and the only thing standing between two hundred islanders and the open Atlantic. When the summer people arrive in their chrome motorhomes and the tour boats clog the channel, the bridge wakes up—and so does Pip.

In prose that smells of salt air, diesel soot, and Marfak Number Three grease, *The Girl Who Drove the Drawbridge* follows Pip through a season of fog-bound crossings, midnight maydays, and a hurricane that strands her alone in the operator's cab, hand-cranking fifteen tons of steel while the wind screams through the trusses. It's a story about learning to read the wind and the water, about the quiet pride of keeping a machine alive with your own hands, and about a girl discovering that the lifeline connecting her island to the world runs straight through her.

For readers who loved *The Light Between Oceans* or *The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon*—for anyone who's ever thrilled to the rhythm of competent hands on honest machinery—this is a novel that respects the work, honors the place, and never forgets that beneath every scheduled crossing lies a current that could tear it all away.