Truths I Learned from Sam

Despite initial misgivings, it's the best summer of 17-year-old Dani's life. Staying in a small community while her mother honeymoons in Europe, Dani finds her days filled with riding, reading, rodeo, and romance. Life couldn't get any better. Then, suddenly, it couldn't get any worse, and she discovers that bad things can happen to good people.

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2016 SYRCA Snow Willow Award — Shortlisted

It’s the best summer of Dani’s life, until the bottom falls out.

Dani’s mother is getting married – again – because that’s what she does, and while she and her new husband jet around Europe for six weeks, seventeen-year-old Dani is sent to stay with an uncle she didn’t know she had in a small community in Cariboo country she didn’t know existed. It promises to be the summer from hell. But Dani’s uncle turns out to be an okay guy. In fact, Dani really likes him. And she finds romance, too.

Suddenly, a summer that had doom written all over it turns into one of the best times of Dani’s life. Until the bottom falls out. In a story about relationships and about how bad things happen to good people, Dani discovers that sometimes the only villain is life itself.