Grayson - book review

The book Grayson by author Lynne Cox is one of those books that I have to be tied down to read. It has enough woo-hoo magical thinking to make me start wondering if I shouldn't be doing something else. In my case I was listening to the book on a Playaway (that handy book-on-a-chip instrument) and was busy working in our library of all places. Had I been using a CD player I would have had dozens of alternate choices but with the Playaway I had about 8 choices, none of them sounding any better.

Back to the book: The plot is simple and the story short. The author Lynne is out swimming off the Seal Beach/Long Beach shoreline building up her strength and endurance when she finds that a baby gray whale has started following her. A friend tells her that she can't come out of the water because the whale would follow and die on the beach. So she swims back out alternately leading and losing contact with the baby whale. The woo-hoo and magical thinking comes when she starts communicating with the baby whale. She assumes that he has lost his mother and then transferring all sorts of human emotional and rational abilities onto the whale starts trying to comfort him and convince him they'll find his mother. His clicks, grunts, whistles, and poofs are a foreign language to her but she's still sure she understands Grayson, a name that suddenly appears in the text but makes perfect sense for a whale who is the son of a gray whale.

By "thinking as loud as she could" and with the help of a few friendly dolphins she is able to reunite mother with baby and all ends happily. By the end of the book I was glad that I stuck it out. The book is definitely one of those "feel good" books that leaves you with the impression that with just a little more work we really could talk to the animals and this interspecies dialog will lead to world peace and brotherhood. You're also impressed that Ms. Cox would stick with her self-assigned goal of reuniting the little familly. Impressed, that is, until you realize that it was probably her swimming that distracted the little one and got him lost in the first place.

Since the action took place in our old stomping grounds around the Long Beach harbor and the Seal Beach pier, it held my interest on another level. I felt like a fact checker for the publisher. I couldn't find anything wrong.

I'm not blown over by this book but I'd still say it was above average.