Customer Reviews

The Highest Tide: A Novel

5 star:		(47)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Jim Lynch's extraordinary first novel centers around a runty thirteen year old boy who knows more than the local marine biologist about the teeming life in the mud flats of Puget Sound and its coves. Narrator Miles O'Malley is an insomniac who takes his battered kayak into the sound at night while his parents and the rest of the town sleep. He collects unusual specimens for aquariums and collectors, and digs for clams with his friend Phelps to sell to local restaurants. In the middle of the night, Miles hears the final exhalation of a dying giant squid. His discovery of the enormous creature never before found on the shores of North America prompts a rush of media attention. At first, no one questions how Miles managed to find the squid in the middle of the night despite his poorly fabricated lie, but when he discovers other non-native sea life and anomalies in the sea and tidal pools, he becomes an object of local fascination. Miles just wants to remain invisible. He is neglected by his parents, who have their own problems, and he struggles with his awkward crush on Angie, an eighteen-year-old, body-pierced girl who plays bass in a grunge band.

Miles is an avid reader of Rachel Carson and her moving descriptions of the ocean, but Lynch, through the voices of Miles, offers his own memorable descriptions of the life, both human and otherwise, that depends on Puget Sound. The narrative voice, with its honesty, wry humor, and poetic language, distinguishes this novel from so many other coming-of-age stories. Insightful without being dogmatic, sensitive without being melodramatic, the prose finds the perfect balance and pitch. Not unlike the earthquake that rattles Olympia--"it shook us just long enough and hard enough to make us feel helpless . . . and just short enough and mercifully enough not to kill us"--the writing makes the reader question her assumptions about the uniformity of marine life and of personal experience.

With this impressive debut, Lynch proves himself a writer to watch. His confident style guides the reader through an odd yet believable world where sea stars can be of any color and thirteen-year-old boys can befriend judges, psychics, and cult leaders. Readers will finish this novel with a sigh not unlike that of the giant squid marooned on the beach.

Set against the backdrop of Washington's Puget Sound, The Highest Tide is an exquisite coming of age story of that uses the mysteries of the life aquatic as a backdrop. Miles O'Malley is a special thirteen year old who has a talent for identifying all sorts of strange sea creatures.

Miles is somewhat of a child protégé, a speed reader from an early age, who loves to quote beloved nature writer Rachel Carson, he seems more obsessed with identifying the creatures of the tidal flats outside his home than mucking around with boys his own age. His encyclopedic knowledge of the ocean enables him to collect specimens that he sells to aquariums and to local restaurants in Olympia.

All that changes the summer before his 14th birthday, when Miles hears a strange sound. He soon finds himself face-to-face with a giant squid; a species that doesn't live anywhere near Puget Sound. Almost overnight, he's discovering other rarely seen sea creatures in the tidal flats. Suddenly, the young boy is thrust into the spotlight, quickly hailed by his community as a local hero, perhaps even a prophet.

Lately however, the winds of change have been bothering Miles. His working class parents have been hinting at divorce, His mother feels as though she's stranded in her tiny stilted house with an un-ambitious baseball fanatic who still barhops with is high school pals.

His elderly neighbor and best friend, the psychically inclined Florence, is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's, and it's not that he can't imagine losing her, but her growing feebleness fits into the fact that he senses that everything is about to shift beneath him.

Miles notices that the bay itself is seemingly shifting into something else - "a trophy view for people rich enough to build houses on the Sunset Estates." He decides that his goal for the rest of the summer is to stop things from changing," to keep my bay, as I knew it intact."

But it doesn't help that Miles is obsessed with local bi-polar girl Rachel Carson. And that fellow friend and partner in crime, Phelps, while intent to impart healthy discussions about "Christy Decker's rack," also nags Miles about sex. The tide begins to rise, just as Florence predicted, and Miles soon finds himself sought after by scientists, journalists, and a group of strange, new-age cult members.

Of course, the young man takes most of this in his stride, as his coming-of-age cleverly coincides with a period of tumult in the ocean and the world around him. Miles never feels sadness on the bay, where the seashells, are as "unique and timeless as bones," where life is much denser in the sea than the air, and where the ocean spits stuff up on the beach, sending us postcards that we don't know how to read yet.

The prose is beautiful: "The albino moon so close and bright it seemed to give off heat," and the narrative philosophy simple and wise: "the wonders of the ocean show that we all die young, that in the life of the earth, we are houseflies, here for one flash of light." Author, Jim Lynch, has not only written a sensitive story of a responsive and remarkable young boy, but he also writes so expertly about the world of the tides.

It's a world where life descends into everything, every crack, every shell, and even between grains of sand. "Life on top of life, barnacles and limpets stuck to oyster shells, clinging to each other, piggybacking on larger shells and barnacles on top of everything." This crisp and clean world utterly captures Miles, and Lynch, through his delicate and intuitive storytelling, ensures that we are captured too. Mike Leonard September 05.

I received this book in the mail last week as my first selection from Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Company's "Maiden Voyage Program" and I loved it. The main character resembles Owen Meany from John Irving's, "A Prayer for Owen Meany". Set in the Pacific Northwest, it is a teenage tale of death, innocence lost, love found and the mysteries of nature that we encounter (or choose not to encounter) every day seen through the eyes of an undersize boy who is wise beyond his age, but is still searching for answers. I was so pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed this book right through to the last page. Thank you, Holly!

I am enjoying the book, except the quality of the editing of the kindle edition is terrible! Poor formatting, and spelling to the extent that I often struggle to determine the intended meaning. I would think this was poor if the ebook was free, publishers need to ensure the quality of publishing for an ebook matches that of a paper book when they charge the same for paper and ebooks.

I enjoyed the descriptions of intertidal life on Puget Sound. I grew up on Puget Sound, took Marine Science from Mr. Craig MacGowan at Garfield High School in Seattle, and now teach middle school Life Science on the Oregon Coast (though with more of a terrestrial bias). I sympathize with the main character, Miles, as someone who wishes others would pay more attention to natural history, and as someone who relates better to adults.

I think Jim Lynch would have been more successful with Miles if he had been narrating as an adult, reflecting on what it was like to be 13, like Ivan Doig did with Jick McCaskill in _English Creek_. Miles spouts facts and trivia like an encyclopedia, and even though he feels like an adult trapped inside an adult body, still, he would be more believable as an adult. None of the natural historians I know with the expertise Jim Lynch has imparted to Miles are under the age of 40. It takes a very long time to develop encyclopedic knowledge like this. The novel didn't strike me so much as a coming-of-age novel at all, because Miles was not believable as a thirteen year old (and I know many 13 year old boys, many of whom are very bright and very unhappy about being surrounded by other kids who don't understand them). Miles sounds more like Jim Lynch reciting the research he had to do to write the book. Having a crush on his former babysitter and his air-guitar playing friend feel like a cut-and-paste job on how to create a thirteen year old. Actually, much of the book feels grafted together.

I also thought Miles' descriptions of peripheral characters as more of the author's unkind assessment of women's appearances: "Her eyes were so far apart she looked like a hammerhead shark," "...with a mole so close to her mouth I wanted to get her a napkin..." "with so many varicose veins a professor could have conducted an anatomy lesson," Evergreen students as "lumpy women", and so on. The author wrote on his website for the book that he enjoyed writing from the perspective of someone who is not jaded or cynical, but if this is the best the author can do, I would argue that Miles is jaded. At least Jim Lynch is.

The climax, the highest tide, was confused and rushed and not important to the story. All the events in the story were hyped and then dropped, and as such, may have been more successful as a set of unrelated short stories.

Finally, for someone so head-over-heels for Rachel Carson, Miles (that is, the author) fell into a generalized disrespect for scientists and revealed a reverence for New Age pseudoscience.

For all that was jarring to me (above), I enjoyed the book - the author pulled me along with enough hooks to keep me turning the pages, although I often found the promised events somewhat anti-climactic. I found Miles a sympathetic character as a natural historian (if not a believable one given his age).

This was gift from my brother. If he hasn't read it, I'll pass it back. I would be tempted to give it to the kid who dragged me into being a staff adviser for the birdwatching club at the parks and rec after-school programs (which has lacked success so far), but there's too much sex in the book to come as a recommendation from a science teacher.

While The Highest Tide has its noticeable flaws, for the most part it's an engrossing read with a likable, interesting main character and a poetic touch of language. Miles O' Malley is a 13-yr-old boy living at the southern end of Puget Sound near Olympia Washington. He has three loves of his life: Rachel Carson, his former babysitter Angie, and the sea life of the Sound. The three all merge amidst the turmoil of the summer detailed in The Highest Tide. Miles begins to find odd, rare creatures on his beach walks; Angie, a bipolar punker is becoming dangerously depressed, and Rachel Carson's fears that the world is slowly being poisoned is seems to becoming true as the sea sends its seeming messengers of doom to the Sound and Miles.
The descriptions of the Sound's teeming life are the poetic strengths of the book, almost always weirdly informative, usually engrossing, and often beautifully poetic. There are times, though, when they seem to be pulled out as if on a schedule and other times where they go on a bit too long, threatening to become an encyclopedia entry rather than a segment of literary writing.
The voice of Miles is also mostly well-done, though it too gets away from the author now and then, sounding less like a 13-yr-old and more like a mouthpiece or a writer. When it stays a boy's voice though, as it mostly does, it is spot on, whether it deals with the impending separation of his parents, his friendship with bigger and much more crudely "earthy" friend Phelps, or best of all, his crush on Angie.
Phelps is probably the most fully real character in the story--adding a pungent dose of sexed up teen boy language and a boatload of humor. Angie fares less well as a character, her travails sometimes seeming a bit forced and two-dimensional, but in her more quiet moments with Miles she is a poignant character that most of us will recall from our own childhood, if not in the details in the tone and general context.
The plot progresses smoothly as Miles' strange ability to somehow "discover" these rare creatures garners him more local fame and interest, including that of a local cult. The section just before the ending seemed to stray a bit from the book's strengths but Lynch recollects himself and his characters and the book ends nearly as well as it began.
Though the signs of a debut novel are clear, the flaws never overwhelm the story and while Tide ends up short of great, it is still an enjoyable and at times moving read, filled with poetic depictions of nature and sharp snapshots of teen angst. A recommended read that bodes well for a second book

It has been a long time since I could not put a book down, and yet I wanted it to keep going. This book is so beautifully written, the science and mystery delightfully presented. It is not a true story, but it has much fact. It is a magical work of fiction with a naturalists' touch of truth. The story is about a young boy, obsessed by Rachel Carson, who sneaks out of his house to explore the tidal flats of Puget Sound every night. Thirteen year old Miles O'Malley experiences a summer that changes him forever, all because he sees things that others walk past, he cares strongly about everything living, and he says things from a deeply thoughtful perspective.

I love the sea and everything about it, and so clearly does Mr. Lynch.

The Highest Tide is like a good friend, you just can't help but keep coming back for more. Set in the Pacific NW in Olympia, WA, Miles O'Malley is a marvelous and interesting young man and this is his story of a summer of discovery in more ways than one. There is alot of marine life details that help put the reader right in the middle of Miles' life. His story was such fun and heart warming I could not put the book down and I was very sad when it was over. A definite "must" read!

The further I got, the more I was sad because I didn't want it to end. The story rips along with dazzling writing and killer verbs and good humor sprinkled along the way like gold coins - or sand dollars, or something. I've given the book to two friends and they raved about it. Great book for not-too-young kids, adults, nature lovers, writing lovers, humans near water, etc. I need to read it again.

I read this book on a recommendation, and didn't quite realize what I was getting into. That was fine, as THE HIGHEST TIDE turned out to be a welcome surprise on a number of levels. However, for those on the outside looking in, it may be useful to know that this book is prototypically "Pacific Northwest." In this case, that means that this novel is an example of very well-written (inspiring, even) environmentalist fiction.

Given some of its frank sexual content, it is a bit of a surprise that this is sort of a Young Adult (YA) book. While the story of young teen Miles O'Malley and his best friend, the over-revved Phelps, will appeal to high school students as well as adults. (And speaking of adults, true to classic YA form, virtually all of the grown-ups in HIGHEST TIDE are useless.)

If you want a mini-synopsis: The book is set in the Puget Sound and explores the eventually fantastic adventures of Miles, a young man fixated on marine biology who has to deal with divorce, girls, and death. It's very funny; one of the laugh-out-loud sections is the dialogue between Miles and Phelps concerning a sexy model. The book is quite touching as well; all in all, it's quite a successful and impressive outing. Nice work, Jim Lynch!