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The Blind Faith Hotel
by Pamela Todd

Margaret K. McElderry Books, Simon & Schuster 2008
The Blind Faith Hotel is a co-winner of the
Newton Marasco Foundation’s 2009 Green Earth
Book Award for Young Adult Fiction.
Learn more about the program and other
award winners.

review by Cristen Vincent

While I couldn't put this book down, there was always a
part of me that wanted to run, screaming, from memories
of my youth. A time of constant awkward feelings and the fear that you will never know the answers.

Zoe, is transplanted from her beloved ocean front to the
dry prairie of the plains. Her dad, who has always been
her guide to survival in the natural world, stays behind. Zoe's mom is chasing a new business venture from a dilapidated old homestead and worries about her own transition, with little time to worry about Zoe and her siblings' fit in the new life.

As the cover of the novel says: Sometimes everything has
to go wrong for anything to go right.

Pamela Todd also wrote "Pig and the Shrink," for which
she was awarded the Judy Blume Grant for a Contemporary Novel for Young People. She lives in the Midwest and is
an avid prairie gardener. To learn more, visit her website
at www.pamelatodd.com.

The Blind Faith Hotel

Margaret K. McElderry Books, Simon & Schuster 2008
The Blind Faith Hotel is a co-winner of the
Newton Marasco Foundation’s 2009 Green Earth
Book Award for Young Adult Fiction.
Learn more about the program and other
award winners.

When her family falls apart, fourteen-year-old Zoe feels like her whole world
is going to pieces. Zoe’s mother takes her kids away from their father, a fisherman who ships out to Alaska, and moves them to a run-down farmhouse she’s inherited in the Midwest. Zoe’s stuck– in more ways than one.

Surrounded by strangers and a sea of prairie grass, she loses her bearings. A brush with the law lands Zoe in a work program at a local nature preserve.
But the work starts to ground and steady her. When she meets a wild boy
who shares her love of untamed places, it seems he might help Zoe find her
way.

Or is he too lost, too damaged himself?

Funny and poignant, sharp-eyed and real this is a portrait of a girl looking for her own true self and a place she can call home.

http://pamelatodd.com