July 13, 2015
Told through the exchange of conversational emails, Sommer and Tighman’s debut features relatable characters in a slightly fantastical yet wholly realistic series of situations. James Turner is a socially awkward high school freshman in Philadelphia, caught between his obsession with whales and a disintegrating childhood friendship. When his sponsored juvenile whale, Salt, breaks away from his pod and engages in abnormal behavior, James blindly reaches out to Darren Olmstead, a former volunteer from his middle school Resource Room. Darren is a recent college graduate with a film degree, working in Los Angeles and struggling to recover from a failed relationship. What follows is a vibrant, in-depth exploration of the parallel paths the lives of these two young men take, highlighting the relative anonymity of computer communication in contrast to the facades presented to the world. The voices and stories of secondary characters lend depth and a more well-rounded perspective. Flashes of humor and empathy are interspersed with exposition from others’ viewpoints, creating a cohesive, emotionally intimate story that sensitively handles loss, grief, accomplishment, and the not-so-simple act of growing up. Ages 14–up. Agent: Sara Crowe, Harvey Klinger.
October 1, 2015
Gr 9 Up-Fifteen-year-old James is reaching out for help; he is worried about the migration of his "adopted" whale, Salt, which he's been tracking for a year. Salt's tracking signal weakened and now is dead. James is also at a loss when it comes to understanding his peers; he studies the Urban Dictionary in an effort to decipher what makes fellow teens tick. In a flurry of email messages, James connects to Darren, a 23-year-old self-proclaimed filmmaker who visited James's special education program the year before. Darren is quick to answer James's e-mails with long descriptions of what's happening in his life. The story unfolds entirely through email correspondence and adding to the story are the voices (more emails) of many tangential characters who have little connection to James or the main narrative. The email trails are difficult to follow, snarling the clarity of the story like too many people talking over one another. The characters appear distracted, their lives replicated in the form of unsatisfying digital communications. The bulk of the narrative flows between James and the struggling Darren; James is having social issues at school and attempts to use Darren as his sounding board. But Darren wallows in self-pity over a broken relationship and friction with his father and stumbles over his college aspirations and his flawed and faltering professional life. In short, Darren is coping with adult issues that have little to do with James's teenage problems. VERDICT An ambitious debut whose overload of secondary characters and complex email-format epistolary style may limit potential readership.-Alison Follos, Au Sable Forks Free Library, NY
Copyright 2015 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
July 1, 2015
An open-ended meditation on loneliness and connection, told in crisscrossing email threads. Whale-obsessed ninth-grader James sends a hopeful email to Darren, the classroom volunteer he remembers from his eighth-grade social-skills class. Darren, a broken-hearted would-be documentarian making a pittance as a production assistant on a junky sitcom, writes back. Deeply concerned about the welfare of a particular whale, Salt, James also starts writing to Peter, a cetologist tracking humpback whales at the Greater New England Whale Conservancy. Peter, worried about his long-lost sister's well-being, does his best to help. Everyone-unbeknown to everyone else-is reaching out for an authentic connection. It's a worthy, sincere theme, and co-authors Sommer and Tilghman pull off a number of genuinely affecting and funny moments, but these are not enough to overcome the thinness of the narrative and structural conceits. Too many of the email exchanges are overburdened with exposition that doesn't make sense in context, and other conversations just don't feel genuine. Readers will root for James, but his characterization relies heavily on cliches about people on the autistic spectrum, while the handling of Darren's post-breakup stalking of his ex-girlfriend is entirely too breezy. The huge number of narrative threads-many left untied-reflect the ongoing-ness of real life, but readers are left feeling like they just viewed a PG-mashup of Garden State and Crash. This briefest of novels might have been more satisfying as a robust short story. (Epistolary novel. 12-15)
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