Holly Mueller's Reviews > Half a Chance

I finished this book on my birthday; it was like unwrapping a gift. What a beautiful story! Lucy just moved with her family to a lake house in New Hampshire, and her dad, whom she admires, is frequently gone on photography assignments for work. She is a budding photographer herself, but needs approval from her father, which she doesn't always get. When a photography contest comes up that her dad is judging, she decides it's the perfect opportunity to show off her talent and hopefully get validation. Lucy befriends a boy who summers at the lake and lives with his grandmother in the next cottage every summer. He helps her with the contest (I know this is crazy, but at first, I missed the fact that the chapter titles coincided with the topics of the contest - don't make the same mistake), and together they look for the perfect shots. To complicate things, Nate's grandmother is showing signs of Alzheimer's, a long-time friend of Nate seems jealous of Lucy, and Lucy can't decide what to do since her father is the judge of the contest - should she enter under a different name? I thought this book had interesting topics for thought and discussion - should art always be honest? What if a piece of art hurts someone? "It was a truthful photo, even if that truth wasn't beautiful." Who owns art? "And whose photo was it? Did it belong to Grandma Lilah because she was in it? Or did it belong to me because I had taken it?" I even have a further question: Does it belong to the viewer of the photo? Would there be art without truth and honesty, even if it's hard to bear? There are further topics of when to say goodbye, what home means, what memory is, living in the moment, how to discover your gifts and talents, when to focus on what's important, and more. Have some tissues nearby for the ending. This book helped me cinch my 2015 One Little Word. Thank you, Cynthia Lord, for the beautiful gift of your art.