SHIPWRECK SEASON

In this rousing cousin to Kipling’s Captains Courageous, a teenage Boston dandy catches up on life lessons when he is consigned to a lifesaving station on Cape Cod. Furious at being forced to leave his high-living friends, Daniel arrives at isolated Perkins Hollow Station surly and arrogant, but after the boat crew’s warm welcome and an invigorating taste of the work, patrolling beaches and keeping watch over the local rocks and sandbars for ships in trouble, he soon pitches in with a will. Weaving in plenty of engrossing details about 19th-century lifesaving procedures and equipment, Hill takes Daniel from a spoiled brat full of preconceived notions to a sturdily confident young man, then tests his mettle with a wild, brutal climactic rescue that leaves several of the crew injured or dead. A cast of larger-than-life characters, including a Harvard-educated descendant of Massasoit and Daniel’s huge, heroic uncle Elisha, give the yarn an epic quality, and the author pays due tribute to a pre—Coast Guard government service that saved thousands of lives in its time. (Fiction. 11-13)