Champlain Summer

Twelve-year-old Max lives a thoroughly modern city life in Toronto. He has some unresolved emotional baggage over the death of his mother when he was five, and he has a less than satisfying relationship with his father, but he is handling things pretty well. Then his world falls apart when he innocently mentions seeing his step-mother with his father's business partner. Now he and his sister are being shipped off to New Brunswick to spend the summer with his grandparents while his parents work on their problems. His grandparents live on a farm opposite an island on which Champlain spent a disastrous winter in 1604. Over the course of the summer, Max's life slowly comes together with the help of his grandparents, his new friends, Tran and Caetlin, and Samuel de Champlain.