From Newbery Medal winner and bestselling author Sharon Creech comes a grand, sweeping yarn that is a celebration of the great and unexpected gifts of love, friendship, and forgiveness. With a starred review from Kirkus Reviews calling it an "enchanting tale to treasure," The Great Unexpected captures the heart and the imagination.
Humorous and heartfelt, this is a story of pairs—of young Naomi and Lizzie, both orphans in present-day Blackbird Tree, USA, and of Sybil and Nula, grown-up sisters from faraway Rook's Orchard, Ireland, who have become estranged.
Young Naomi Deane is brimming with curiosity and her best friend, Lizzie Scatterding, could talk the ears off a cornfield. Naomi has a knack for being around when trouble happens. She knows all the peculiar people in town—like Crazy Cora and Witch Wiggins. But then, one day, a boy drops out of a tree. Just like that. A strangely charming Finn boy. And then the Dingle Dangle man appears, asking all kinds of questions. Curious surprises are revealed—three locked trunks, a pair of rooks, a crooked bridge, and that boy—and soon Naomi and Lizzie find their lives changed forever.
As two worlds are woven together, Creech reveals that hearts can be mended and that there is indeed a gossamer thread that connects us all.
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“Creech, a Newbery Award–winning author, deftly weaves a multilayered story in which past and present thread their way around Naomi the romantic and Lizzie the singer…An enchanting tale to treasure in which ordinary folk find fairies’ gold, run across crooked bridges and mend and their broken hearts.”
— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“Creech pulls young readers through the thrills and confusion of a first crush… Creech captures the magical in-between state of a girl’s maturing.”
— New York Times Book Review“A joyous testament to the surprising nature of life and the smallness of our world.”
— Booklist“An epigraph, prologue, and first chapter that increasingly pull readers in deeper and deeper…Quirky and alliterative.”
— School Library Journal“A gently timeless atmosphere…Mysterious and numinous.”
— Guardian (London)Be the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Sharon Creech has written more than twenty books for young people and is published in over twenty languages. Her books have received awards in both the United States and abroad, including the Newbery Medal for Walk Two Moons, the Newbery Honor for The Wanderer, and Great Britain’s Carnegie Medal for Ruby Holler. Before beginning her writing career, she taught English for fifteen years in England and Switzerland.
Heather O’Neill is a Canadian novelist, poet, short story writer, screenwriter, and essayist. Her prize-winning debut novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, was published in 2006 to international critical acclaim. Her novel, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and the short story collection, Daydreams of Angels, were shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in consecutive years. The collection was also shortlisted for the Paragraphe Hugh McLennan Prize for Fiction.
Erin Moon is a professional actor and an AudioFile Earphones Award–winning narrator of over 150 novels. She lives and records in beautiful Vancouver, Canada.
Heather O’Neill is a novelist, short-story writer and essayist. Her previous works include The Lonely Hearts Hotel, which won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction and was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and CBC’s Canada Reads, as well as Lullabies for Little Criminals, The Girl Who Was Saturday Night, and Daydreams of Angels, which were shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Orange Prize for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize two years in a row. O’Neill has also won CBC’s Canada Reads and the Danuta Gleed Award.