But when word gets out that the farm is hiding something valuable, reporters, researchers, and neighbors arrive in droves. The bones must be a message from her grandfather, a connection from beyond the grave.

But when she follows her little brother, Bo, and her dog, Old Jack, up the hill while chasing fireflies, she makes an incredible discovery-dinosaur bones peeking out from underneath the abandoned tractor. (Aug.Twelve-year-old Esme’s life changes when she discovers dinosaur bones on her family’s peach farm in Texas.įans of Wendy Maas and Lynda Mullaly Hunt will love this perfectly pitched story about friendship, family, and loss from Suzanne Crowley, the acclaimed author of The Very Ordered Existence of Merilee Marvelous.Īfter her grandfather died from a heart attack while driving his tractor on Solace Hill, twelve-year-old Esme's been inextricably drawn to that spot, although her grandmother warns her to stay away. Crowley ( The Stolen One) creates a believable small-town Texas setting, but the plot circles rather than advances-side tales about townspeople seem unrelated, as does a thread about the family’s ability to find missing things. Her tough grandmother, Bee, cares for the family, which faces the foreclosure of their struggling Texas peach farm her father, Harlan, disappeared years earlier and her mother, June Rain, has “been in a bad spell as long as a Texas drought.” When a professor arrives to investigate the bones, Esme worries that he’ll take away the one thing that makes her life special, but he opens her eyes to paleontology as an exciting field of study and to the idea of a future outside of the small town. Esme feels alone among her absent family members. No one knows what Paps was looking for that day, and if anyone did, they wouldn’t say. Three months after 12-year-old Esme McCauley’s grandfather dies while digging on Solace Hill, Esme discovers dinosaur bones under his tractor at that very place.

The Stolen One by Suzanne Crowley