On my third try, the audiobook grabbed me. This is a slow starter that takes a sharp turn in the middle and REALLY accelerates at the end. It's hard to discuss the plot as there are a lot of reveals and secrets, and I did wish I had the print book so I could flip back and forth. WOW. Suffice it to say I ended this one (yet again) sobbing in my car. It gave me a historical fiction feeling that I don't really remember since reading Number the Stars and The Devil's Arithmetic as a younger reader -- like I was so emotionally there in the book. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 "It's like being in love, discovering your best friend." 
 "There were no route maps posted on the walls, but a Wonderland-style sign commanding, 'If you know where you are, then please tell others." 
 "Maddie took the top of her egg off. The hot bright yolk was like summer sun breaking through cloud. The first daffodil in the snow. A gold sovereign wrapped in a white silk handkerchief. She dipped her spoon in it and licked it." 
 "I am no longer afraid of getting old. Indeed I can't believe I ever said anything so stupid. So childish. So offensive and arrogant. But mainly, so very, very stupid. I desperately want to grow old." 
 "FLY THE PLANE, MADDIE." 
 "Maddie flew back following the 70-mile, 2000-year old dragon's back of Hadrian's Wall, to Carlisle and then south through the Lakeland fells, along Lake Windermere. The soaring mountains rose around her and the poets' waters glittered beneath her in the valleys of memory - hosts of golden daffodils, Swallows and Amazons, Peter Rabbit. She came home by way of Blackstone Edge above the old Roman road to avoid the smoke haze over Manchester, and landed back at Oakway sobbing with anguish and love; love, for her island home that she'd seen whole and fragile from the air in the space of an afternoon, from coast to coast, holding its breath in a glass lens of summer and sunlight. All about to be swallowed in nights of flame and blackout. Maddie landed at Oakway before sunset and shut down the engine, then sat in the cockpit weeping. 
 More than anything else, I think, Maddie went to war on behalf of the Holy Island seals."