One moonlit night, 13-year-old Miles O'Malley slips out of his house, packs up his kayak and goes exploring on the flats of Puget Sound. What begins as an ordinary hunt for starfish and clams is soon transformed by an astonishing sight: a beached giant squid. The first person to ever see a giant squid alive, the Rachel Carson-obsessed insomniac instantly becomes a local curiosity. When he later finds a rare fish in the waters near his home, and saves a dog from drowning, he is hailed as a prophet. But Miles is really just a teenager, infatuated with the girl next door, worried that his parents will divorce, and fearful that everything, even the bay he loves, is shifting from him.
Miles O'Malley is another one of those precocious fictional young people whose personality is expressed through an obsession--Miles's is with Rachel Carson and the sea around him. He is also, conveniently, a 13-year-old insomniac, so he spends a lot of his nights on the water; one night he finds a giant squid, still alive, and becomes a local hero. Fisher Stevens gives this first-person character an appropriately young and "gee whiz" timbre as he ponders his parents' crumbling marriage, his crush on the older Angie, the disagreeable nature of celebrity, and his "best friend," the elderly curmudgeon Florence. The production is simple but polished and authoritative; the gobbets of undigested Carson are not wholly convincing, but plenty interesting. B.G. 2006 Audie Award Finalist (c) AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine
About the Creator
Jim Lynch has won national journalism awards and published short fiction in literary magazines. A Washington state native, Lynch currently writes and sails from his home in Olympia, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
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