A lively narrative that should inspire careful consideration of the oceans.
In this debut novel, a sea squirt larva leaves her tide-pool home on a journey of acceptance.
Eleven-year-old Siona Seaton hates the ocean. Unfortunately, her mother, Dr. Seaton, is a marine biologist and has brought her to the beach to collect samples. While she’d like to sit somewhere dry and read, Siona instead explores the tide pools—and gets bit by a ragworm. Later, at home, Dr. Seaton consoles her daughter with the story of Siona the sea squirt, who lived 521.2 million years ago. Siona is a larva, still able to swim before attaching to a rock for the sedentary portion of her life. But her father, Sir Squirt, notices that her head and tail are much bigger than they should be, lamenting, “Not all larvae can be perfect.” He also tells her that only 10 percent of sea squirt larvae survive. Yet Siona believes her large tail can help others, and a neighbor, a Hallucigenia named Helamite, suggests visiting Clarissa the Clairvoyant Clam for advice. Her parents disapprove of the adventure, but Siona hopes to locate Sydney the Sea Star, who knows the secret passage to Clarissa’s tide pool. Danger lurks along the way in the form of pistol shrimp and sea spiders. Liepe’s enjoyable educational novel doesn’t stop with characters based on marine invertebrates from the colorful Cambrian radiation. In this tale that exceptionally smart kids and adults should find entertaining, she packs her prose with science facts from various disciplines, as in the line “Photons of light escaped” the sun “as packets of energy, waves, and particles to bombard and bounce from the shell of a snail.” But some of the concepts—like protein “widgets”—may be tough for younger readers to visualize without a quick web search. The friendly images by debut illustrator Kathleen reveal just how bizarre animals like Anomalocaris canadensis were. Occasionally, Liepe checks in with her human cast, and as Siona learns about the sea, she gradually overcomes her fear of it. Toward the end is a useful warning about ocean acidification and bleached coral, signs that humanity is destroying the foundation of the planet’s abundance.
A lively narrative that should inspire careful consideration of the oceans.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-3896-9
Page Count: 202
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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