Plover Pilgrimage

by Cari Noga

Robby Palmer, a 12-year-old boy with autism and a percolating passion for all things avian, is on his way to northern Michigan’s Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore to see the piping plover. On the remote beaches where the endangered plover nests, Robby, his parents and a patient park ranger discover the magic in a rare bird— and in a rare boy.

“The story Cari Noga tells is honest and hopeful, the arc of the story is quietly huge and significant. It's a wonderful story that will make your heart grow.”
-Lynne Rae Perkins, Newbery Medal winning author of Criss Cross and other works

A portion of book proceeds will benefit piping plover projects in the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Plover Pilgrimage is excerpted from a full-length novel, Sparrow Migrations, also available on

36 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 20, 2013

About the author

I'm so appreciative of all the readers who've reviewed The Orphan Daughter and Sparrow Migrations, and especially grateful to those who have selected them as book club choices. If your club has, I'd love to have a picture for my website, or join via Skype if we can coordinate schedules. Email me at cari@carinoga.com. (You can also sign up for my author newsletter www.carinoga.com -- the best way to hear about a new book!)

If you've not read my books yet, I write resilience stories about contemporary, unconventional families. My latest, The Orphan Daughter, explores whether prickly Jane McArdle will do better at motherhood her second time around, after her orphaned niece Lucy Ortiz moves from New York City to Jane's Michigan farm. It's set where I've lived for 20 years, Traverse City, Michigan, which made it a lot of fun to write.

Resilience in a theme in my author journey as well. After failing to finish two manuscripts, I finally completed my debut, Sparrow Migrations, during National Novel Writing Month in 2010. It becames a semi-finalist in the 2011 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, with Publishers Weekly describing the manuscript as “brimming with humanity and grace.” Sparrow’s protagonist, Robby Palmer, a 12-year-old boy with autism, and his parents, Sam and Linda, embody many experiences my husband and I have had as parents to a son with autism. I self-published it in 2013 and then was lucky enough to receive an acquisition offer from Lake Union Publishing an imprint of Amazon Publishing, in 2014. Sparrow was re-released in paperback, digital, and audio formats in June 2015. It was nominated for the Great Michigan Read, a statewide reading project, in 2015-16. A five-part small-screen miniseries adaptation is now available - producers wanted!

You can stay in touch by signing up for my author e-mail newsletter at www.carinoga.com. Thanks for reading!