Sea Change: The Mystery of the Captain's Daughter

Fourteen-year-old Lucy Irving, can't stop thinking about a dead girl-a girl who lived a century and a half ago. Lucy becomes obsessed with the past and begins to wonder if it is as dead and unchangeable as it has always seemed to her. Following the death of her grandfather, Lucy spends the summer with her grandmother in Newburyport, Massachusetts. While her primary purpose is to help Gramma, who reluctantly must prepare to move to a smaller less expensive home, Lucy secretly hopes that a summer away from her parents will be full of adventure. While cleaning out the attic, she finds a diary written in 1864 by another 14-year-old girl named Rebecca Cornwall describing her troubled relationship with her estranged alcoholic father who she is forced to live with after the death of her mother. Since he is the captain of a coasting schooner, she must live aboard the ship as it travels to various ports along the New England coast. The diary abruptly and mysteriously ends mid-voyage as a budding romance between Rebecca and a young crew member intensifies. With the help of quirky Civil War re-enactor Sarge Buchanan, Lucy develops the ability to see into the past, and ultimately, to communicate with those in it. By using these abilities, she is able, not only to find out what happened to Rebecca, but also to change the past, which leads to a reconciliation between Rebecca and her father. Her actions also change the present, resulting in positive effects upon the lives of her grandmother and numerous other characters. Lucy's experience ultimately proves that the past is all around us, and that the events and people of long ago are, in a sense, as real as those of the present.