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Kah-Lan the Adventurous Sea Otter (Sono Nis $9.95)
You know you're stuck on a story when it stays in your head for three decades and it won't let go. Such was the case for Karen Autio and her fourth book for children, Kah-Lan the Adventurous Sea Otter.
After moving to Vancouver to attend Regent College in 1984, Autio and her husband Will soon bought aquarium passes. For hours at a time, she would park her lawn chair outside the sea otter enclosure, observing, wondering, and developing a story about two, almost-mature, wild sea otters getting swept away by a powerful ocean current.
The story persisted in her mind as she shifted her focus to raising her children and writing three historical novels. Over the years Autio kept fine-tuning the balance of her otter story between natural history and a quest story. "I was not only smitten with sea otters," Autio says, "I was also fascinated by their survival skills in the Pacific Ocean."
While Autio's admiration for otters shaped the plot, the manuscript was passed through a string of biologists to ensure naturalistic accuracy. Dripping with ecological facts yet without a whiff of didacticism, Kah-Lan the Adventurous Sea Otter weaves the natural environment into the myriad challenges that otters contend with-from orcas and riptides to food scarcity and fishing net entanglement.
Kah-Lan and his pal Yamka must contend with human encroachment, hide from orcas, dive for ever-scarcer food in their home kelp bed and avoid periodic grouchy cuffings from the Grand Otters living in their raft.
The young otters describe humans and human-made objects in zoomorphic terms such as sea-trees, furless ones and-my personal favourite-not-rock (kelp forests, humans and an old glass bottle, respectively).
Reminiscent of the invented words in Richard Adams' Watership Down, the language in Kah-Lan is nonetheless easy for young readers to discern without a glossary-although there is one provided.
"I played with language to express Kah-Lan's perspective," says Autio, "and to immerse the reader in his watery world. Kalan is a zoological term for sea otter and the spelling Kah-Lan helps readers know how to pronounce it."
At the end of the book, readers will find several pages of information about sea otters, including their role in keeping our kelp forests healthy so that they, in turn, can support a diversity of sea life.
Engaging text, quick pacing and illustrations by Sheena Lott put the reader at eye level with the demands of life in our shallow coastal waters, while present-tense narration lends a sense of urgency to the otters' experiences.
Targeted mainly for readers ages seven to twelve, Kah-Lan is a story with cross-generational appeal because it will lead to conversations about the health of our oceans, the necessity of maintaining biodiversity of the maritime environment and the importance of keystone species-such as the sea otter. 978-1-55039-244-9
After moving to Vancouver to attend Regent College in 1984, Autio and her husband Will soon bought aquarium passes. For hours at a time, she would park her lawn chair outside the sea otter enclosure, observing, wondering, and developing a story about two, almost-mature, wild sea otters getting swept away by a powerful ocean current.
The story persisted in her mind as she shifted her focus to raising her children and writing three historical novels. Over the years Autio kept fine-tuning the balance of her otter story between natural history and a quest story. "I was not only smitten with sea otters," Autio says, "I was also fascinated by their survival skills in the Pacific Ocean."
While Autio's admiration for otters shaped the plot, the manuscript was passed through a string of biologists to ensure naturalistic accuracy. Dripping with ecological facts yet without a whiff of didacticism, Kah-Lan the Adventurous Sea Otter weaves the natural environment into the myriad challenges that otters contend with-from orcas and riptides to food scarcity and fishing net entanglement.
Kah-Lan and his pal Yamka must contend with human encroachment, hide from orcas, dive for ever-scarcer food in their home kelp bed and avoid periodic grouchy cuffings from the Grand Otters living in their raft.
The young otters describe humans and human-made objects in zoomorphic terms such as sea-trees, furless ones and-my personal favourite-not-rock (kelp forests, humans and an old glass bottle, respectively).
Reminiscent of the invented words in Richard Adams' Watership Down, the language in Kah-Lan is nonetheless easy for young readers to discern without a glossary-although there is one provided.
"I played with language to express Kah-Lan's perspective," says Autio, "and to immerse the reader in his watery world. Kalan is a zoological term for sea otter and the spelling Kah-Lan helps readers know how to pronounce it."
At the end of the book, readers will find several pages of information about sea otters, including their role in keeping our kelp forests healthy so that they, in turn, can support a diversity of sea life.
Engaging text, quick pacing and illustrations by Sheena Lott put the reader at eye level with the demands of life in our shallow coastal waters, while present-tense narration lends a sense of urgency to the otters' experiences.
Targeted mainly for readers ages seven to twelve, Kah-Lan is a story with cross-generational appeal because it will lead to conversations about the health of our oceans, the necessity of maintaining biodiversity of the maritime environment and the importance of keystone species-such as the sea otter. 978-1-55039-244-9
Submitted on November 9, 2015 in By David.
