Review of The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch

This is a book that can draw the reader completely into a world on the edge of the Puget Sound. Thirteen-year-old Miles O'Malley is an only child, and it's pretty clear from his parents' conversations that he was an unexpected, perhaps unwanted, child, and they don't pay much attention to him. Miles, in contrast, pays attention to everything, and the life of the bay where he lives absorbs most of his attention, especially during the summer months. He spends much of his time out exploring and collecting specimens--to be sold to restaurants or private collectors. As an entrepreneur, he even employs a larger boy his own age to do some of the heavy digging and lifting. His assistant, Phelps, is obsessed with women's bodies and classic rock, and his pithy normality balances Miles's precocious wisdom, making them an entertaining duo, especially when Miles offers tidbits of information on sea creatures' reproductive processes.

Since Miles spends so much of his time on the water's edge, the reader is treated to his observations and discoveries and can learn quite a lot about marine life. Indeed, he is in a fair way to becoming the resident expert on Skookumchuck Bay, since he also reads extensively about the marine life he observes and has comradely chats with a biology professor. One reason that Miles sees so much in the environment around him is that he is an insomniac and goes out surreptitiously alone at night as well as during the day. He is also a fan of Rachel Carson's writings, and can quote whole paragraphs from them. This novel embodies an argument for knowledge of the environment and for paying attention to the details of the lives among which we live and die.

After Miles discovers a beached giant squid, he attracts the attention of the local media, and is on his way to being a minor celebrity. The fact that he is small for his age, and looks several years younger than thirteen, seems to make his pronouncements even more appealing to the reporters who seek him out, and the media attention in turn draws the interest of a local New Age cult. Because his closest friend is an elderly retired psychic named Florence, Miles gets in the habit of dropping "wise" observations, like "Maybe the earth is trying to tell us something." It's difficult for him to keep the media attention from going to his head, and eventually he repeats Florence's prediction of a record high tide that will occur on a specific date in September--and then worries about whether he's made a fool of himself.

But while this attention circles around him--and he tries to avoid it--Miles worries about (and gets angry at) his parents, he worships his former babysitter who plays bass and sings with a local band, he worries over the progress of the degenerative terminal illness that grips Florence. He's after all a reasonably normal kid, and as he grows into awareness of his own sexuality, he's thinking about some of those forces that drive human lives--the nature of love, the interrelationships of living beings, the factors that drive the natural world (and us), the inevitability of death.

This is a really wonderful novel--beautifully written, attentive to detail, realistic in characterization. I'd heartily recommend its use in high school classes and would certainly pair it with some of Rachel Carson's writing as well as reading about marine life and environmental issues.

The book has its own Webpage, complete with giant squid video, at http://thehighesttide.com/. It has been discussed or reviewed at http://www.reviewsofbooks.com/highest_tide/review/, http://www.hcplonline.info/weblog/readers/2007/05/highest-tide-by-jim-lynch.html, and http://rcbookclub.blogspot.com/2007/10/comments-by-moderator-jim-lynch_22.html (the Rachel Carson Centennial Blog).