Whalesinger

Betsy Nuse, the former owner of Boudicca Books, is a Vancouver poet,
writer, and editor.

This ambitiously plotted and well-written novel takes a group of
scientists from Vancouver to participate in studies at Point Reyes,
California, for the summer. The story’s teenage protagonists, Nick and
Marty (a female), assist the adults, Nick as a computer operator and
Marty as a babysitter. The story’s backbone is the openly sexual
romance between Nick and Marty, but Katz has overlaid two interesting
elements on her story: parallel action in the historical past, and a
nonhuman-species subplot.

As the book opens, Nick’s supervisor, Dr. Anderson, explains that Sir
Francis Drake is “thought to have careened the Golden Hind in Point
Reyes.” Reading a book Dr. Anderson lends him, Nick discovers that
Drake is also thought to have executed his friend Thomas Doughty there,
and to have forced Thomas’s angry brother John to stay with him for
the remainder of their voyage to England. Nick, whose older brother
Richard was killed in an explosion aboard the research vessel sponsoring
this summer’s expedition, feels immediate sympathy for John Doughty;
and, at the story’s climax, Nick finds himself in precisely the same
relationship to Richard’s former boss Ray Pembroke as John was to
Drake.

Woven into these human plots is the story of a lone gray whale who
lingers in the Point Reyes estuary long after northward migration, to
nurse and protect her ailing calf. Marty is drawn to the whales. Through
the mother’s songs, Marty and the reader learn more about Drake’s
visit to California, and about previous geological disasters, which are
paralleled in the earthquake culminating this book.

Katz succeeds in drawing every thread of her story line together for
this dramatic climax, without reforming her characters or offering moral
judgments. For this reason, as well as for the book’s complexity, this
book would be appropriate to teach in the middle grades. It will also
reward thoughtful, older teenagers willing to suspend their commitment
to “real life” stories set purely in the teenage present.