Amazon.com description: Product Description: For Raleia Pendle, spending the summer in Tidal, Maine, sounds like the perfect antidote to the turbulent, free-spirited 1970s in which she lives. Tidal looks almost exactly as it did in 1911, when a tidal wave crushed the town and killed over a hundred people. It's the ideal place for Raleia to live out her daydreams of life at the turn of the century and to avoid her cranky pregnant mother and her self-absorbed father.

After hearing form the local kids about Ian Rutherford, the reclusive old man who lives in a mansion on a hill overlooking Tidal, Raleia thinks she has found her living link to the past. But when she tries to befriend Rutherford, who has hardly left his home since the tidal wave almost seventy years earlier, Raleia discovers that the past wasn't the golden time she imagined.

In a story filled with the romance of the past and promise of the future, a young girl who feels that she doesn't belong with her family or in her time gains a better understanding of herself and the people who care about her. Told in the graceful, lyrical style that marked A. LaFaye's first novel, The Year of the Sawdust Man, Strawberry Hill will touch all readers who have longed to be somewhere else.