All the Walls of Belfast, Carlson Sarah

Wisconsin Library Association Outstanding Children's Book By a Wisconsin Author for 2021

Seventeen-year-old Rose Hemmersbach aspires to break out of small town Sparta, Wisconsin and achieve her artistic dreams, just like her aunt Colleen. Rose's love of Frida Kahlo fuels her paint brush and her dreams to attend a prestigious art school. Painting is Rose's escape from her annoying younger siblings and her family's one rule: ignore the elephant in the room, because talking about it makes it real. That is, until the day Rose finds her mother dying on the kitchen floor of a heroin overdose. Kneeling beside her, Rose pleads with the universe to find a heartbeat. She does - but when her mother is taken to hospital, the troubles are just beginning. Rose and her dad are left to pick up the pieces: traumatized siblings, a Child Protective Services investigation, eviction. As Rose fights to hold everything together, and her dreams of the future start to slip from her grasp, she must face the question of what happens when - if - her mom comes home again. And if, deep down, Rose even wants her to.

Fiona and Danny were born in the same hospital. Fiona's mom fled with her to the United States when she was two, but, fourteen years after the Troubles ended, a forty-foot-tall peace wall still separates her dad's Catholic neighborhood from Danny's Protestant neighborhood.

Fiona was about to start a summer job to pay for a field study, her golden ticket into MIT. But then a letter from her allegedly deadbeat dad reveals he's always wanted to be in her life. Fiona returns to Belfast, where she learns the bloody truth her mother sheltered her from--her seemingly sweet father was a bomb maker for the Irish Republican Army during the Troubles. Now there's only one person Fiona can count on, her older half-brother, Patrick.

Danny's alcoholic father wants him to join the Loyalist paramilitary like him, but Danny dreams of making his deceased mother proud by becoming a nurse in the British Army. To reach his officer test and escape his father's abubse forever, Danny must find a way to earn a hundred twenty quid for a plane ticket without getting a criminal conviction. And make sure his father doesn't discover his plan.

After chance brings Fiona and Danny together, their love of the band Fading Stars, big dreams, and desire to run away from their families unites them. Danny and Fiona must help one another overcome the burden of their parents' pasts. But one ugly truth might shatter what they have...