Sherri L. Smith,
Lucy the Giant.
Delacorte, 2002.

The town of Sitka, Alaska, has little to offer fifteen-year-old Lucy Otsego - little besides an indifferent father who drinks himself into oblivion and a community that pities this practically orphaned giant of a girl. Even school doesn't afford much of a haven for “Lucy the Giant,” whose height (more than six feet) provides ample material for high-school teasing. Things temporarily take a turn for the better when Lucy adopts Bar, a stray dog that follows her home, but Lucy's newfound happiness is short-lived: Bar soon dies, leaving Lucy numb with grief and lonelier than ever.

In a fit of desperation, Lucy hops a plane that carries her (along with a group of seasonal workers) to Kodiak, where, in an instance of rare luck, Lucy lands a job on a crabbing boat. The work is brutal for experienced fishermen, not to mention a teenage girl who has never before done backbreaking physical labor, but Lucy is determined to prove that she's up to the task. Her time on the crab boat not only fills her with new confidence, it introduces her to Geneva and Harley, two friends who become the family she's never had.

Alternately beautiful and terrifying, friend and foe, Alaska and the Bering Sea act as an ever-changing and effective backdrop for this novel about fighting - and persevering - in the face of overwhelming challenges. Relaxed intervals between shifts on the crabbing boat as well as scenes in Cap'n George's house provide a warm contrast to the chilly and chilling depictions of the fishing crew at work.

The story sometimes requires greater suspension of disbelief than some readers may be willing to offer, and various key scenes may, in the context of a story that is supposedly realistic fiction, strike readers as implausible. Lucy's ability to get on a plane to Kodiak without a ticket in hand, her victory in a Kodiak bar when she drinks a grown man under the table, and her rescue from the sea, made possible in large part by help from an orca whale, are a few examples.

Nevertheless, Lucy the Giant is compelling from start to finish. Most satisfying is the novel's ending, which provides a bittersweet but realistic conclusion to Lucy's season of trials. Lucy's burial of her past, both literally and figuratively, shows the potential for new beginnings back in Sitka, where change - and the sense of hope that accompanies it - is undeniably in the air.

Jenny Sawyer

Summer 2002