First published 2026
Maya watches her parents pour every resource into her drug-addicted brother while she becomes a ghost in her own home. Her dreams of college crumble when her parents drain her grandfather's fund to pay for another round of rehab. With her future dissolving, Maya receives an unexpected lifeline: a scholarship for an exchange program in rural Norway. She packs her few belongings and flies across the ocean to a landscape of fjords and midnight sun, where strangers speak a different language and snow falls in patterns she has never seen. In this remote corner of the world, Maya must learn to navigate new customs, forge connections with her host family, and discover whether belonging is something you find or something you create. Freeman crafts Maya's journey in verse that captures both the sharp edges of abandonment and the tentative hope of starting over in a place where no one knows your history.
Genres: literary-fiction, coming-of-age, contemporary, young-adult, poetry, family-drama
Vibes: atmospheric, emotional, hopeful, introspective, lyrical
Tropes: coming-of-age, fish-out-of-water, found-family, starting-over
Setting: Norway, Fjords
Period: Contemporary
336 pages · Hardcover · Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Content warnings: addiction