The Line Tender by Kate Allen

Twelve-year-old Lucy Everhart's lives in the town of Rockport, Massachusetts with her father Tom who is a detective and who also serves on the Salem Police dive team. Her mother, a marine biologist who studied sharks, passed away five years ago, after suffering an aneurysm while on a research boat. Lucy was seven years old at the time. Her best friend, thirteen-year-old Fred Kelly lives across the street from her house. Fred and Lucy share a unique relationship; they do almost everything together but they each have their own interests. While Fred is brilliant and science focused, Lucy loves to draw.

One summer morning, while Lucy and Fred are in the Country Store buying candy, when they hear that a local fisherman has brought in a shark. They race down to the wharf where they find a crowd looking at a huge great white shark hanging from a hoist. Fred suggests that they enter this into their field guide, "an extra-credit project for science class that is due in September." Fred had suggested they work on the field guide over the summer; he would do the writing and Lucy would do the illustrations. To date they have a black-capped chickadee from Pigeon Cove and a spotted salamander from a pond in the woods.

Sookie,  a fourth-generation Rockport fisherman who caught the shark, tells Lucy that it was caught in their net while they were fishing for cod. Lucy's father is also at the wharf taking pictures. Lucy questions her father as to why the great white was so far north; he tells her that they follow their food especially seals which are beginning to return to the island in the area.

That night Lucy and Fred watch coverage of Sookie's shark on the news and see old footage of Lucy's mother talking about sharks. Watching her mother on television upsets Lucy because it feels like her mother is alive and will be home for dinner soon. She and Fred decide to head down to the wharf to work on their field guide. Lucy checks in with her neighbour, Mr. Patterson an elderly widower who enjoys listening to the radio and the police scanner. He tells Lucy that the police are keeping watch over the shark. Sure enough they find Officer Parrelli in his car at the wharf. Lucy works on her sketch of the shark and when it begins to rain, Officer Parrelli drives them home.

The next morning, Mr. Patterson tells Lucy that the big storm brought down trees, caused power outages and the shark is missing. At the wharf they meet Sookie with his father Paulie and Officer Parrelli. Fred believes that something happened to the shark during the storm. The next day they go to Folly Cove, a place Fred often goes to collect specimens for his aquarium. At the cove they find a "freakishly large" moon snail. Fred is amazed at how Lucy can recreate the snail on paper, making it look three-dimensional. She tells him she's not a "science person", that "...if you could tell science like a story, I'd pay attention." Fred eagerly obliges by telling Lucy several stories about the moon snail and shells which she finds interesting.

In the evening Lucy's father explains that they now know what happened to Sookie's shark; the storm broke it off the hoist and carried it out to sea. While Fred and Lucy are working on their science guide in Lucy's mother's library, Fred discovers file boxes and uncovers an proposal titled "Proposal for Cape Code White Shark and Gray Seal Study",  which Lucy's mother wrote in May 1991, a month before her death. Stunned and completely taken by surprise, Lucy reluctantly lets Fred take home the proposal, which he promises to return.

On Saturday night, Fred's sisters, Fiona and Bridget are preparing to go out when Lucy arrives at their house. Fiona does Lucy's makeup much to Fred's puzzlement. Fiona and Bridget tell their mother that they are simply "going over to Lauren's house to watch a movie...". Suspecting that they are meeting up with Bridget's new boyfriend, Dominick Maffeo, their mother insists that they take along Lucy and Fred. It turns out that they are going to swim at the Cape Ann quarries along with Lester, Sookie's deckhand and Simon Cabot. Soon bottles of cheap liquor are being passed around with Lucy and Fred also drinking. Impulsively, Fred jumps into the quarry and reluctantly Lucy follows him and the others. Suddenly Fred is no where to be found....

With Fred's death, Lucy's world is turned upside down. Can Lucy look beyond what she's lost and forward to what might be in the future? Her mother's past research proposal unexpectedly leads Lucy to find her way forward while grieving the loss of her best friend and her mother.

Discussion

The Line Tender is the debut novel for Kate Allen. The title is taken from the term "the line tender" used when divers are searching for a missing person in the water. "The line tender holds the line above the surface. The primary diver descends through the dark and cold until he hits bottom....It is so dark that even with a searchlight nothing would be visible....The line tender holds the line and directs the diver in an arch search, the primary diver moving in a three-foot circle around himself, feeling for the child." The line tender is someone who is essentially the life line for the diver who during a difficult search is completely dependent upon him.

This imagery is carried on throughout the novel after the death of Lucy's friend, Fred Kelly. Immediately after his disappearance, during the search, while Lucy is waiting in the ambulance, she imagines the line connecting her to Fred. "In the back of the ambulance, with Fiona, I had tried to imagine a string that wrapped around my hand. It had threaded out the door of the truck. It had crossed the dirt path and avoided the feet of those watching the rescue efforts, draping over the cliff. It had dropped into the water, the end of the string moving toward Fred like there was a gravitational pull. And when it found him the string curled around Fred's wrist. I held the line." Lucy saw herself at that moment as the line tender, Fred's last hope.

Lucy spent all her time with Fred. Their relationship was moving from a childhood friendship into something more just before his death. Their first kiss happened during the evening at the quarry. Lucy must now deal with this second loss, only five years after the death of her mother. Without Fred, she must now come to terms with his death and find a path forward. That path turns out to be a rediscovered connection with her mother.

Lucy retrieves her mother's study proposal from Fred's room along with his backpack. When Fred had discovered the proposal in her mother's library, it brought back to Lucy a part of her mother that she never really knew much about because she was so young, only seven years old.  "The 1991 box was like the kite on a snapped string, a loose piece of her that Fred had caught. It was her words, recorded at the point when she was as old as she was ever going to get....He had found a treasure." Little does Lucy know at this time just how important this lost treasure will be to her. 

The proposal which now has Fred's notes along the margins, turns out to be a lifeline - a line tender. It leads her to Vernon Devine, a shark expert and Lucy's mother's mentor, now long retired and suffering from dementia. Despite this, Lucy is able to learn more about her mother and her proposal from someone who was close to her and worked with her. Lucy is encouraged by Professor Devine who tells her the seals will return and along with them the great white sharks. In a moment of confusion, thinking she is Lucy's mother Helen, he tells her to do the census. A news report on television leads her to meet Dr. Robin Walker, another colleague of her mother. Dr. Walker tells Lucy that her mother's proposal is now being implemented and when a shark washes up in Chatham, she invites Lucy to the necropsy. While Lucy does sketches of the shark as it is being dissected, her father takes photographs. Later, when her father develops the film, he tells her that his favourite photo is one where she is intensely drawing. Her focus and attention to detail lead her father to remark that she would make a good line tender.
"...The line tender sees everything. Reads the divers' signals, the terrain, the equipment. Uses all the resources to stay connected to the other end of the line."

By following the leads from her mother's proposal, following the clues and holding onto the line that led back to her mother, Lucy has been able to rediscover her life and begin healing from the deaths of both Fred and her mother. The thread once lost between herself and her mother, has been recovered and reestablished.

Allen's idea to write this story came from her own experiences in 1996 in her hometown of Beverly, Massachusetts, when a fisherman caught a great white shark. Many people visited Beverly Harbor to see the shark and the necropsy. Years later, in a writing class, she remembered this incident and wrote it up with the characters of Lucy and Fred, as the opening for a novel.

Overall, The Line Tender is a well-written debut, with a well developed setting and lots of facts about marine life. Xingye Jin's beautiful pencil sketches of different types of of sharks can be found throughout the novel. The relationship between Lucy and Fred is perhaps the most appealing aspect of this novel, and the death of Fred so soon in the novel is both tragic and unsettling. Readers may find themselves disappointed at this plot twist because Allen has crafted such a realistic and innocent relationship between the two friends. They accept each other as they are, their differences, quirks and strengths. And Allen portrays their friendship with a touch of humour. While Fred's death allows Allen to take the story in a direction most young readers might not be expecting, it's still disappointing because readers are already invested in the two main characters. Allen's last tribute to Fred Kelly is "Lucy's" drawing of Fred's arm hold the large moon snail: a fitting tribute to a character the reader grew to love in the story.

A great debut novel and readers should look forward to more from this gifted writer.

Book Details:

The Line Tender by Kate Allen
New York: Dutton Children's Books   2019
371 pp.

Inland by Kat Rosenfield

Inland is an atmospheric novel that leaves readers wondering whether the main character is insane or really is what she believes she is as suggested in the first chapter. The central character is sixteen-year-old Calypso (Callie) Morgan who lives with her professor father, Alan Twaddle and who struggles to cope with an unsettled life after a family tragedy.

The opening chapters provide the back story, first fifteen and then nine years previously. We  meet Callie's mother, Maera Morgan fifteen years earlier - a young woman who had carefully and in a calculating manner, selected a lonely, passionless geoscience professor to marry and to give her a child. Maera made sure the man she chose was someone she would never love and Alan Twaddle was certainly someone who fit that criteria -an academic buried in his research. Then nine years ago, with her six-year-old daughter Callie in a boat, Maera simply slipped into the water and disappeared, presumed drowned. Callie was questioned but no one believed her story nor understood why Callie didn't help her mother.

In an effort to forget Maera's death, Callie and her father moved inland, the first few moves within the state of California.  Callie's mom has a younger sister, Nessa, whom Callie is close to. Nessa tells Callie that her mother's family all live near the sea in many different countries throughout the world. They are drawn to the sea with many being sailors, swimmers, divers, fisherman and aquatic biologists. Nessa tells Callie that the ocean has a voice that seems to beckon them, an idea that her father finds ridiculous and chalks up to Nessa's use of marijuana.

After the second move, Alan decided to leave California, taking Callie away from the ocean and the home she loved so much, and move to the Midwest. Nessa didn't travel with them, warning Alan "God knows how your daughter will suffer before you see how wrong it is." For nine years Callie and her father moved from place to place in the Midwest, from Grand Junction, Colorado to Elko, Nevada to Laramie, Wyoming where they've lived for the past six months.  A year after her mother's death, Callie developed problems with her lungs, having attacks that left her unable to breathe and often requiring hospitalization and numerous medications. These mysterious attacks puzzled doctors who were never quite able to pin down a diagnosis. Callie eventually stopped making friends; too many moves and too many hospitalizations.

While in Laramie, an old colleague of Alan's, Mike Foster, began calling him from the Gulf Coast. Her father has a reputation as an excellent geotechnical engineer and he's being courted for a huge wind-farm project to be developed in the Gulf. With the offer to pay for their move and Callie's treatments at a university hospital, Alan agreed to move to Florida.

The story reverts to the present as Callie and her father settle into a house on a river that leads to the Gulf and she is enrolled in a private school called Ballard. Callie is provided with a new physician named Sharp who starts her on new medication. Within a month of arriving Callie finds her breathing begins to ease, her attacks less frequent. She meets the young girl next door, Bee, who insists she's seen a dark-haired mermaid in the river near the dock.

When Callie goes to see Dr. Sharp she tells him that she has been having vivid dreams, which the doctor suggests might be the result of the beta-blockers she is taking. What she doesn't tell Dr. Sharp is that when she closes her eyes, she sees someone in the darkness of her mind. Callie believes this is her mother and she takes great comfort in these dreams.

Then one day Nessa surprises everyone arriving for an extended visit, not having seen Callie for nine years. At school Mr. Strong, Callie's biology teacher, assigns a cute boy, Ben Barrington to help Callie settle in. For the first time in years, Callie makes friends; Ben's friends who include sisters Mikah and Shanika and Jana who specializes in just being herself. There's also cute Eric Keller, Meredith Hartman's boyfriend.

At night Callie retreats to her dreams where she believes she meets her mother in the depths of the ocean. Then her dreams change with Callie hearing her mother beckoning her to come away with her, to come home. One night Callie sleepwalks to the dock entering the river, only to be saved from drowning by Nessa. Nessa and Callie keep this episode a secret from Callie's father and they decide to lock her bedroom door at night as Callie can't be sure this hasn't happened before.

Because of her dreams and her belief that her mother lives on in the sea as a mermaid, Callie feels drawn to water, to the ocean and wants to learn to swim. When she does, Callie discovers she is a natural. In fact, she's so good that Eric Keller who is a member of the school swim team, suggests that she try out for the team. All Callie wants to do however, is answer the persistent call of the sea, to swim in the Gulf where she believes she's being called.

Callie's swimming begins to trim her body of the doughy physique she had acquired over the years and she becomes lean and taut, growing taller and broad shouldered. For the first time in her life, Callie feels strong and capable, in charge of her life and her destiny. In the water she feels confident. "Everything that made me flat-footed and ungainly in my old life is different in the water...I will never be a teenage dream of sinuous, delicate femininity. Not on land. But swimming, even my large hands and feet seem streamlined. Flat and powerful, knifing and kicking as I relearn to move below sea level."

Ben begins coming to visit Callie at her home, meeting her father and taking her out. Nessa warns Callie to be careful telling her "This boy will want to keep you."  But Callie begins to fall for Ben enjoying her time with him and they way they make plans to do things together. Just when Callie's life seems to be falling into place, her health recovered, a cute boyfriend and an almost family with Nessa and her father, things begin to unravel. The pull of the ocean overwhelms Callie, almost leading to a terrible tragedy and resulting in difficult decision by her distraught father to save his daughter from the fate she seems destined for.

Discussion

Inland is psychological mystery in which Callie's condition can be an either or. Rosenfield presents her readers with two choices; is Callie part of a line of mermaids who still feel the call of the ocean or is her heritage really that of mental illness. 

Rosenfield weaves the mermaid theme in early, incorporating some of the mermaid mythology into the opening chapter. In mermaid mythology, mermaids were believed to be creatures who were half-woman half fish, who sang to men on ships, luring them into the sea with their beautiful songs, only to drown them. Callie's mother seems to suggest that she has been granted time on land to carefully select a man to give her a child, but is always intent upon returning to the sea. As Callie grows older she learns that she comes from a family in which all the women seem irrevocably drawn to the sea and appear to need to live near it in order to remain healthy. Inexplicably, Nessa won't follow Callie and their father as he moves inland but when she learns of Callie's move to the Gulf Coast she leaves immediately. Callie's Aunt Lee however, moves as far away from ocean as possible, after the death of her husband and son, and is very sick when Callie contacts her. This suggests that her illness is the result of her distance from the ocean.

The mermaid theme continues when Callie moves to Florida and she lives next to a river. Ben takes her to an area where there are manatees, which Callie immediately feels an attraction to. These elusive creatures were once thought to be mermaids. The evil mermaid theme appears throughout most of Callie's nightmares. Her mother does not appear as the beautiful, kind mermaid of modern culture but more as a willful, dark one. Rosenfield's descriptions portray this well: "I can feel, rather than see, her pale, long hand as it brushes my hip or shoulder; the glint in her large black eyes..." and later on after the near drowning of her and Ben: "Her skin is silver-white and cold, hairless and slick. I feel long limbs sliding past me, a hand like silk on my back....There is something stretched between her fingers, a gossamer membrane too slippery to grasp. The oval nails are longer now, skinless, gray, thick, and hooked and glistening in their points....The high rise of her forehead breaks the surface, water beading on the ridges where her eyebrows used to be. Eyes like black marbles peer back at me, lightless and shining with no whites at all." This description suggests something malevolent and dangerous, not motherly.

Even the mystery over Callie's maternal family suggests either mermaid or madness. Nessa tells Callie that her grandmother, glamorous, smart and gifted, "rejected what she was meant for" and disappeared. Aunt Lee also hints at Callie's mysterious family past remarking that no one has told Callie anything.  The theme of mental illness is also woven through the novel as Callie gradually loses her grip on reality and begins to recognize that her obsession with the sea seems to mirror that of her mother's before her death. Callie asks herself if the voice of sea once called out to her mother too and could she have believed that that is where she belonged?  Readers may think they know where Rosenfield is going with her storyline, but she does throw in enough twists to keep readers wondering.  Is Callie really seeing something in the river or are her vision the product of a sick mind? Are her dreams the result of the psychological trauma she experienced as a young girl and is unable to process properly, or the product of a true longing to return to the sea?

Rosenfield's prose is beautiful and captures the setting of her story well. However, sometimes the extensive descriptions overwhelm the novel which perhaps could have benefited from better editing especially at the beginning when readers have to catch up on the missing nine years following Maera's death. The ending of Inland is unexpected and cryptic, leaving readers to make their own conclusions. Inland is an interesting variation on the mermaid theme that seems to be seeing a resurgence of interest in young adult literature. Fans of Anna Banks, Of Posiedon series may not find this one quite to their liking, given the cryptic, unresolved nature of Inland. But it is well written and the mental illness twist adds to the mystery.

Book Details:
Inland by Kat Rosenfield
New York: Dutton Books      2014
382 pp.