

And make sure his father doesn't discover his plan. 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. 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.

Now there's only one person Fiona can count on, her older half-brother, Patrick. 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. But then a letter from her allegedly deadbeat dad reveals he's always wanted to be in her life. Fiona was about to start a summer job to pay for a field study, her golden ticket into MIT. 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 and Danny were born in the same hospital. Seventeen-year-olds, Fiona and Danny must choose between their dreams and the people they aspire to be. The Carnival at Bray meets West Side Story in Sarah Carlson's powerful YA debut set in post-conflict Belfast (Northern Ireland), alternating between two teenagers, both trying to understand their past and preserve their future.
