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.
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