• Age: 12 to 15
• Grade: 7 to 10
• Reading age: 12 to 15

2016 VOYA Top Shelf Fiction Selection
CCBC’s Best Books for Kids & Teens (Fall 2016) — Starred Selection

Hope leaves her small town for a fresh start, but her plans are derailed by an online romance and the appearance of her brother.

Hope lives in a small town with nothing to do and nowhere to go. With a drug addict for a brother, she focuses on the only thing that keeps her sane, writing poetry. To escape, she jumps at the chance to attend Ravenhurst Academy as a boarding student. She’ll even put up with the clique-ish Ravens if it means making a fresh start.

At first, Ravenhurst is better than Hope could have dreamed. She has a boyfriend and a cool roommate, and she might finally have found a place she can fit in. But can she trust her online boyfriend? And what can she do after her brother shows up at the school gates, desperate for help, and the Ravens turn on her? Trapped and unsure, Hope realizes that if she wants to save her brother, she has to save herself first.

An author and junior high school teacher who also enjoyed many years of teaching kindergarten, Colleen Nelson earned her Bachelor of Education from the University of Manitoba in her hometown of Winnipeg. Her previous works include the critically-acclaimed middle-grade novels Harvey Comes Home and Harvey Holds His Own; Sadia, which won the 2019 Ruth and Sylvia Schwartz Award; and Blood Brothers, which was selected as the 2018 McNally Robinson Book of the Year for Young People. Colleen writes daily in between appearances at hockey rinks and soccer fields in support of her two sports-loving sons. The family’s West Highland Terrier Rosie adds an extra-loveable dose of liveliness, squirrel-chasing, and shoe-chewing to their lives.

 

Colleen Nelson's profile page

• Commended, CCBC's Best Books for Kids and Teens, Starred Selection (Fall 2016)
• Commended, VOYA Top Shelf Fiction for Middle School Readers

The prose is simple, yet elegant, and readers will appreciate the dual meaning of the title, in Hope’s self-discovery, and the literal need for the characters to find hope.

Canadian Children's Book News

Steeped in emotional torment.

Publishers Weekly

…an arresting read that adeptly tackles the dark, weighty subjects of bullying, drug addiction, sexual assault, homelessness and loss. Told in simple yet striking prose, peppered throughout with Hope’s haunting poetry, Finding Hope offers an engaging brother-sister narrative, flawed yet relatable characters, and a convincing, well-paced plot that succeeds in laying bare a fractured family’s harrowing struggle with addiction, and one young woman’s achingly real odyssey of self-discovery and healing.

Quill & Quire

The silence and shame around sexual abuse infuses this novel with an aching loss for what could have been but now is lost. Both this abuse and the online texting of sexual pictures reflects dangers faced by the intended audience, who will no doubt pass this book eagerly from hand to hand.

Resource Links

For suspense and gritty realism … Finding Hope takes top marks.

Winnipeg Free Press

★ Both heartbreaking and hopeful, this will be a popular choice among mature readers of realistic fiction, particularly fans of Ellen Hopkins’s “Crank” series.

School Library Journal (Starred Review)

Through brief alternating chapters told by Hope and Eric, Nelson conveys Hope’s naiveté and innocence, as well as the gritty truth about Eric and the trigger for his addiction.

Booklist

…a well-plotted, fast-moving little angst tornado of a read.

Globe and Mail