• Age: 8 to 11
• Grade: 3 to 6
• Reading age: 8 to 11

Carly is nine-going-on-ten and she loves to dive - dive from the rocks at her family's cabin in the Gulf Islands, dive from the boards at the pool where she and her friends belong to the Dolphins Diving Club. She loves the feeling of floating up into the air and then dropping cleanly into the water with hardly a splash. She loves the feeling that she gets when everything goes just right. Then Carly invites her best friend Montana to spend the weekend at the cabin. They play on the beach, build forts and explore the island, waiting for the tide to get high enough so that they can dive off the rocks. And then when it does, Montana dives too deeply and hits her head on a submerged log. And Carly's world suddenly changes. Waiting to Dive is a sensitive, amusing, realistic account of a child's attempt to deal with tragedy. Carly is given to much exaggeration, dislikes her step-brother and -sister, has not yet come to terms with her father's death, and wears her emotions on her sleeve - in short, she is a very real young girl. The story she tells will resonate with young readers.

Karen Rivers is the author of numerous novels, mostly for young adults. Her books have been nominated for a number of awards, including the Sheila A. Egoff Children's Literature Prize and the Silver Birch Award. Karen has a BA in International Relations, which makes her an asset on any trivia team that emphasizes global politics in the late 1980s or early 1990s. As a lifelong hypochondriac, she once thought she'd be a doctor but realizes now that writing is a much more sensible career choice as it allows enough time to research symptoms on Google without having to actually go to medical school. Karen lives, reads and writes in a yellow house near the beach in Victoria, British Columbia, and can almost always be found online at www.karenrivers.com.

Karen Rivers' profile page

• Short-listed, SYRCA Diamond Willow nominee
• Short-listed, Silver Birch nominee
• Commended, CCBC Our Choice
• Commended, Best of the Best North of the 49th