Blueback

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This thin volume doesn't aspire to the mature complexity of the talented Australian author's The Rider. Though the language is lyrical, Winton pares it down, deliberately simplifying his prose in the service of a clearly articulated call for ecological responsibility. Abel Jackson lives in isolated area of Australia between a national park and the sea, where he helps his mother dive for abalone; his father is dead. When he's 10, he encounters a huge, magnificent blue grouper he names Blueback, a fish legendary for its cleverness and daring. Danger arrives in the form of a vicious fisherman whose predatory methods despoil the bay and put Blueback at risk. Though Abel's mother manages to drive the fisherman away, Abel learns that "there was nothing in nature as cruel and savage as a greedy human being." Over the years, unprincipled developers, pollution and other man-made disasters threaten the bay's pristine beauty before Abel's mother persuades legislators to declare the area a sanctuary. Abel, now a marine biologist, decides to abandon his international career to devote his life to the priceless natural domain where Blueback continues to swimand to bond with another generation of Jacksons. The book is perhaps more suitable for YA readers than adults, but Winton pulls deftly on the heartstrings as he narrates this quiet tale. (Mar.)

Library Journal

Young Abel and his mother, Dora, lead a peaceful, idyllic life by the sea in Australia. They live off the land and sea, taking no more than they need to survive, carefully husbanding the natural resources at their disposal. Abel's best friend is an enormous fish named Blueback. Time passes, Abel grows up, and he and his mother find it harder to protect Blueback and their "Robbers Bay" from unscrupulous fishermen and developers. Who will prevail in the end? Winton (The Riders, LJ 3/15/95) has imbued this slender tale with the air of an environmental parable, yet the tone is never preachy but contemplative. Recommended especially for environmental collections. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/1/97.]Kay Hogan, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham

Kirkus Reviews

The prolific Winton (The Riders, 1995; etc.) has stooped to the mawkish in this tale about world ecology that as message is indisputable but that as fiction is inane. Abel Jackson's forebears were whalers, his father a pearl- diver whose life was ended by a shark. When this tiny slip of a story opens, Abel is ten years old and living a life of hard but edenic subsistence with his mother on the family property that's squeezed along the coastline, a national park behind it, the bay, headland, and open sea n front. Part of the pair's income derives from snorkel-diving for abalone off Robbers Head, and it's a sign of the times when, after the good abaloner Mad Macka dies of a heart attack, he's replaced by the villain Costello, a rapist of the sea (unlike the good Abel and his mother, who take "a couple of abalone from each clump, leaving the rest to breed and grow"). Costello is run off by the law after a heroic and admittedly dramatic intervention by Abel and his mom, but there are other woes in store for the sea. "Things aren't the same, Abel," says mother. "It's getting harder to hold on to good things." After unexplained fish kills ("The ocean is sick," says mom. "Something is wrong"), Abel determines that he'll go "to university to figure out the sea." His international career as a marine biologist takes him far from home, mother, and the enormous, blue, friendly groper he played with off Robbers Head throughout his boyhood. But age, time, and another disaster will bring him back forever to care for mother, baynow declared a sanctuarywife, and new family. Psychologically and in every other way a YA, though apparently aimed at an adult trade audience. Pretty writing (a baby girl has"fists. . . like pink seashells" and "cried like a bird") helps offset the simplistic elements of the whole.