When Bailey and her brother spend a month on an island with their grandmother, it should be a magical summer. But with her parents failing at Marriage Camp and her best friend getting sicker every day, Bailey sure could use a miracle.
A warm and wistful novel about the hard and beautiful truths of growing up and growing into one’s own ability to shape the world.
Root Beer Candy and Other Miracles (Pajama Press, 2016) is a middle grade novel in verse, available now in paperback and e-book. **2nd Edition (cover shown) available June 2022.
Awards and Honours:
- 2017 International Youth Library White Ravens selection
- 2017 Spring Best Books for Kids & Teens Starred Selection
- 2017 SCBWI Crystal Kite Award finalist
- 2016 Resource Links “The Year’s Best”
State/Provincial Reading Lists and Readers’ Choice Award nominations:
- 2018 Manitoba Young Readers’ Choice Award
- 2018 Rocky Mountain Book Award
- 2018 Chocolate Lily Book Award
Reviews:
“…a light-hearted yet evocative page-turner … Green’s writing is captivatingly visual, with seamless inclusions of figurative language … versatile as independent reading or as an engaging read-aloud.”—CM Magazine
“Recommend this lovely and poignant novel to middle grade readers who enjoy coming-of-age stories.”—School Library Journal
“[A]n excellent choice for thoughtful middle-grade readers and would make a valuable addition to a school or classroom library. It’s also a fine complement to the verse novels of K.A. Holt, and a stepping stone to the work of authors like Sonya Sones, Virginia Euwer Wolff, and Martine Leavitt.”—Resource Links
“Writing in verse, Green aptly captures the journey of a girl faced with her first real heartbreak—the likely dissolution of her family. Bailey’s openness to confronting her reality while still believing in the extraordinary adds to her charm, as does her growing realization that heartache affects many others in her life as well.”
— Canadian Children’s Book News
“Root Beer Candy and Other Miracles is Shari Green’s debut novel but it is an accomplished story in form and content worthy of a seasoned writer….Balancing structure with plot is complicated. Yet Shari Green dives right in, creating characters and circumstances that effortlessly carry the reader from beginning to end on waves of sentiments, some fearful, most benevolent, all heartfelt. Root Beer Candy and Other Miracles is in itself a miracle…”—CanLit for LittleCanadians
Shari Green 