28 April 2010 KEEPER by Kathi Appelt, Atheneum, May 2010, 416p., ISBN: 978-1-4169-5060-8

[If you are the woman (accompanied by the voraciously-reading daughter) with whom I conversed at the Books of Wonder event, please let me know you read this message so that I will stop worrying about somehow locating you in order to let you know that this is the book to get.]

"Do you believe in magic in a young girl's heart?"-- John Sebastian

"In that very moment Keeper became intensely aware of the crabs in the tub.  She could hear their pinchers snapping in a nervous frenzy.   But when she squatted down next to them, they stopped and became perfectly still.  For the first time ever, she noticed the delicate markings on their shells, saw the perfect symmetry of their heart-shaped backs and the imperfect balance of their large and small claws.   Suddenly, the crabs seemed beautiful to her, all of them facing her, looking up at her."Oh no! she thought.  Signe was going to drop them into boiling water, drop them in alive.  Their wonderful shells, blue and brown and white, would turn pink and then red in the hot liquid.  Keeper's stomach did a flip.  She couldn't look at them."She turned away from the tub and hurried to the bathroom, where she sat down hard on the edge of the bathtub.  The porcelain finish felt ice cold through the seat of her pajamas.  Her heart beat like mad against her chest.  As mad as the crabs.  She grabbed one of her great grandmother's white cotton towels and bit it."What to do?"

I've been enjoying telling friends about a recent adventure.  Amidst my just-completed two months of living on the South Fork of Long Island (while engaged in a temporary training and supervisory gig for the Census Bureau), I took off one afternoon and drove to Northport.  Once there, I spent hours walking the lanes that are nestled up alongside the edge of the Harbor; eventually weaving my way up into the neighborhood that overlooks the water; and then I hiked over to the public library where I was going to be conducting a workshop the following week. 

The part I enjoy telling everyone about is how Northport is so special to me because I would often get dropped off there by myself as a child in the mid-Sixties.  For seven dollars I could rent an old rowboat for the entire day.  I'd row out through Northport Harbor past all of the moored ships and, then, into and around Northport Bay.  There were a number of times, having rowed out to the far end of the Bay, when the swells would begin to rise and fall dramatically and the wind and tide would mightily conspire to thwart my return to the safety of the Harbor.  Some of those episodes in the middle of the Bay were unquestionably amongst the scariest moments of my childhood.  That I spent those hours muscling my way back safely made for adventures that forever transformed the shy, quiet, oldest child who I'd been.  Those sojourns wrenched me out of my shell, gave me a real measure of confidence, (and led to reoccurring water dreams).

The part that I haven't been sharing with anyone is that on those days out rowing, I'd have a fishing rod with me and I'd always spend some time fishing.  And I don't like thinking or talking about that part because then I have to think about how perfectly fine I felt at that point in my life, sawing the head off of a live, suffocating fish; slicing open its stomach cavity; and eviscerating it.  It was squishy and gross but, in performing the operation as I'd been taught, I did it with no more thought than one would expend whilst unearthing a carrot, twisting off its top, and shredding it for a salad.  

I feel revulsion for having grown up seemingly without any sensibility for what I was really doing, for having grown up presuming that being human made me unique and superior, gave me the right to take the lives of other creatures and to do so with nary a thought as to the gravity of what I was doing.  It is an ugly little part of me that I do my best to keep well-hidden behind the decades that followed.  

At college, I resided toward the Ag corner of campus.  On a whim, I accepted an invitation to join some dorm mates one afternoon after classes (without a thought as to what would really be involved) in heading over to watch a half-dozen pigs get slaughtered. 

Witnessing that process finally did it for me.  My a-ha moment.  I watched what they did to Wilbur and his siblings.  I was a vegetarian soon thereafter.  Still am.

When I think sad thoughts about all of the great, wild mammals that were relatively abundant during my childhood but have been steadily killed off and are all now on the brink of extinction, I think how I've long wished that I'd been born with some sort of sense that every living creature has a place, has significance, and should be respected.

Sometimes I wish so badly I could just have a do-over.

"Gumbo.  Ukulele.  Night-blooming cyrus.Stars in a line.All on a blue moon night."

And that has got to be what Keeper feels as she sits in a rowboat in the middle of the night -- a long-awaited blue moon summer night -- that follows the day when everything goes so wrong, beginning with her hearing the crabs speak to her, and her subsequently liberating them from their starring role in Signe's blue moon gumbo.

"And don't let love go by"--Joanne Rand, "Grant Me Eyes"

Keeper lives on Oyster Ridge Road, an isolated, oyster shell-paved Gulf-side road in the middle of a Texas state park.  The residents of Oyster Ridge Road are the elderly Mr. Beauchamp with his one-eyed cat Sinbad; the stuttering Dogie, who runs Dogie's Beach Umbrella and Surfboard Shop out of what had once been the yellow school bus he'd arrived in from New Jersey; and Signe, the young, water-fearing Iowa native who has raised Keeper here since that day when Keeper turned three and her birth mother Meggie Marie swam away forever.  (I absolutely love Captain, the watermelon-craving, scene-stealing seagull.)

"Stupid crabs."

It is on this magical night of the summer blue moon -- the night that follows a day during which Keeper succeeds in hurting the feelings of every one of the adults who care about her -- that she and her faithful dog BD sneak out after bedtime and steal Dogie's rowboat in order to head for the sandbar in hopes of seeking advice from her long-lost mermaid mother.

KEEPER is the story of this fateful night and the individual stories of the human and animal residents of Oyster Ridge Road, each of whom will play an essential role in this night.  

KEEPER, by Newbery Honor author Kathi Appelt, is one of those couple of books in the category of If You Are Just Going to Read a Couple of Books This Year...