The Lighthouse Keeper's Apprentice
A Summer of Tides and First Loves

About this book:

Six months after his mother's death, seventeen-year-old Leo is exiled to Gull Rock—a crumbling lighthouse on a spit of granite off the Maine coast—with a grandfather who speaks in grunts and a silence that stretches back generations. Arthur Vance doesn't want a visitor, and Leo doesn't want a summer of scraping rust off iron plates in the salt wind. But as the tide cuts them off from the mainland, the work becomes a language of its own: the rhythm of wire brushes, the weight of timber, the slow revelation of a tower that refuses to stay dark.

High in the lantern room, a dead light flickers at midnight. Initials carved into the iron—*E.V. + M.K., 1962*—hint at a love story the family never told. And down in the harbor, a boy named Jude rows out through the fog, bringing stories of shipwrecks, local lore, and a kindness that cracks Leo's armor. As autumn gales bear down, Leo will have to decide what he's willing to salvage: the lighthouse, his grandfather, or the parts of himself he thought the sea had already claimed.

*The Lighthouse Keeper's Apprentice* is a salt-weathered coming-of-age novel about grief that feels like weather, love that arrives like a tide, and the stubborn, luminous act of keeping a light burning when the world goes dark.