Holding On, Letting Go: Listen! by Stephanie S. Tolan

Life has handed Charley a double whammy. Her mother was killed suddenly in a plane crash while on a nature photography assignment in Brazil, and with her father turning to work to escape grief, Charley becomes emotionally dependent upon her best friend Amy. Then Charley is seriously injured in an automobile accident while Amy's brother is driving. Inexplicably, Amy leaves for a summer-long tennis camp, and with her gone, the silence and loneliness at home comes down hard on Charley.

Ordered to walk daily to rehabilitate her severely injured leg, Charley meets up with an almost feral dog, thin and wary of humans. As Charley circles the small lake near her home each day with her neighbor's playful dog Sadie, the stray dog joins them, keeping his distance but following her back home. Something about the dog draws Charley to him. Feeling that she is able to intuit his sad history with humans, Charley makes it her summer's work to tame him, and naming him Coyote, she begins to get him to accept food and finally her touch.

As she begins to feel a loving connection with the dog, Charley's heart begins to open again to her father. As she does, she finds she is able to open her mother's last published book of photos of their lake and read the quotations she had chosen for each picture. With Coyote Charley visits the places where the photos were made for the first time since her mother's death and learns to listen, as her mother taught her, to the sounds of nature and to the healing love offered by her friend Amy and her father.

In Newbery author Stephanie Tolan's hands this story becomes more than a girl-meets-dog story, as Charley's heart opens to the possibilities of life ahead for her. Listen! is a coming of age story of love lost and love found.

Stephanie Tolan's Surviving the Applewhites,a very funny but equally poignant coming of age story, was awarded the Newbery Honor Medal in 2003.