Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #338990 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 160 pages

Customer Reviews

"Something had brought us together. Something much bigger than the two of us."
When seventeen-year-old Lynne Cox is finishing her morning swim between Seal Beach pier and the San Gabriel River jetty, south of Los Angeles, she is hungry and cold. It is March, and the water temperature is in the fifties, but Lynne, a serious open-water swimmer, is in training, regularly doing three-hour workouts in the cold Pacific. When she discovers that a baby gray whale is following her to shore, she realizes that the baby must have lost its mother. Remaining in the water, alone except for the whale, she continues swimming on the chance that the baby, whom she names Grayson, will hear its mother vocalizing or that the mother will find them.

For the next couple of hours, she and the whale swim the one-and-a-half miles from the pier to an offshore oil rig in deep, often rough, water. The whale is confused, often diving deep and disappearing for ten minutes or more at a time, and Lynne begins to despair. When he finally disappears for a very long time and shows no signs of resurfacing, Lynne, close to hypothermia and discouraged, decides to head back to shore, alone.

By now this story is so well known that it gives nothing away to say eventually there is a happy resolution to the story. For Lynne Cox, however, there is a much bigger story than "just" the reunion of the baby and its mother. For her, this experience has been a test of her strength, her will, and her faith, resulting, finally, in her personal triumph.

A morality tale about the interconnections of man and nature, Grayson is full of the "truths" drawn by a sensitive seventeen-year-old who sees the baby whale in human terms. She thinks only positive thoughts, sending mental messages to the baby whale and to his mother, telling them that she will help them find each other. She explains that "there are two ways of thinking--one of possibility and hope, the other of doubt and impossibility," adding that sometimes "the things that make the least sense to other people make the most sense to me."

Mentioning that Grayson would be thirty years old at the time of writing, the author believes she learned much about life through this experience, never doubting her romantic conclusions or the pronouncements she makes throughout her narrative. Though the author originally wrote this book for adults, its popularity among junior high students speaks to its appeal. The world she describes is not the nature of "tooth and claw" or the survival of the fittest. It is a world in which humans can interact with nature through positive thoughts and energy, and those, in turn, can reunite a baby whale and its loving mother. Mary Whipple