Kathryn Berla

Sixteen-year-old Krista is having a hard time. She's still grieving the recent death of her mother when her father's girlfriend, Marie, moves into their home, and Krista feels like there's no one she can talk to about her sadness. To make matters worse, her best friend, Lyla, is heading to Maine for the summer to spend time with her grandparents. Krista feels pressure from the people around her to resume a normal life; her father wants her to find an activity to occupy her summer, and her neighbor encourages her to return to therapy. However, Krista doesn't feel ready to be "normal" again; she'd rather hang out in a tent she'd pitched on her roof, or sit in her car obsessively watching a mysterious house, the house at 758. Just when things start to feel too hard for her to bear, she runs into Jake, a fellow classmate and the cute sales associate at a store where she shoplifts. A young romance quickly forms, but Krista has a hard time opening up to Jake. She remains guarded and manages to push him away. One day, her father informs her that her grandfather, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who lives in Venezuela, is coming to town for a visit. Krista is at first irritated that she'd have to babysit her foreign grandfather whom she barely knows, but soon realizes that he may be just the person she needed in her life. Krista's grandfather begins telling her stories of his past, of tragedy, hope, and forgiveness, and with these new developments, Krista begins to open up and embrace life again. She ends up confronting her grief and gains a greater understanding of her family's past and what she has to look forward to in life.