Tempest Seymour, orphaned at five, lives with her fisherman grandfather along the Washington coast. Worried about her relative isolation, her grandfather sends her to summer camp inland once she turns 15. There she forms an unexpectedly strong bond with Chase Reed, a boy from an insular family of conservationists in the Cascades. Though they fall out of touch for years, unexpected and tragic circumstances bring them together once again—forcing Tempest to reckon with whether she belongs in the mountains or by the sea.
Rebecca Babcock’s WHERE THE SEABIRD SOARS announces its priorities in the title: “where,” the sense of place, is the text’s strongest component. The prose belies a real, deep love for the Pacific Northwest, both its misty oceanic coast and its forested glacial ranges. Descriptions of lichen hanging from trees “like a shawl to keep off the chill from the westerly wind,” for instance, manage to intimately combine close observation of place with an almost Gothic rendering of the natural world. This metaphoric vocabulary is well-developed and omnipresent. When Tempest’s grandfather piques her interest with a story, he’s “baiting her like a fish,” and when Chase stands out amongst his peers, he does so “like a towering oak amid a grove of saplings.” The text can feel a bit on-the-nose in these moments, but they nevertheless transport the reader and ground the external and internal action in the beauty of Washington State.
Though the descriptions are effective, the prose does need a cleanup. In some instances, phrases need commas or other punctuation to avoid running on: “[he] sat down beside her their arms touching.” In others, cumbersome armfuls of clauses become spatially tangled: “She hung her headlamp from a hook off the headboard and placed a book she was reading on the Franklin Expedition beneath her pillow.” These are simple fixes, but the issues crop up regularly throughout the text. WHERE THE SEABIRD SOARS also wobbles on voice. Part of the conceit is that the protagonists have both enjoyed unusual, isolated upbringings—but their speech can oscillate wildly between hotly snarky and poetically formal, neither register feeling natural for characters in their teens or early 20s. More naturalistic speech might make it easier for the reader to empathize with these already-unusual characters.
WHERE THE SEABIRD SOARS is unquestionably genre fiction. It’s a romance novel about two teenaged sweethearts finding one another again in early adulthood. However, it’s worth noting that the novel reinscribes the traditional values of the genre to a degree that could be alienating to some readers. Chase’s family is alarmingly traditional: their father keeps order with corporal punishment; the three brothers are quick to anger and physically fight to resolve disputes. Unsurprisingly, there’s competition over a woman with deliberate disregard for what she wants. When Tempest spends time with this family, even though she’s been established as smart, strong, and independent, she falls quickly into their emotional routines; she and Chase’s mother cook, clean, and mend clothes while the men go into the woods to hunt, fish, trap, and chop wood. Tempest professes some discomfort at these circumstances, but it’s window-dressing on a plot that’s already headed for an obvious conclusion.
For readers who are accustomed to some of these genre elements in other romance novels—a woman sacrificing her independence to subordinate herself to an emotionally stunted man who construes himself as her physical and moral protector—this might be acceptable. But to a casual reader, the plot and character development may be frustrating and ultimately unsatisfying. And to a serious reader of romance fiction, it fails to bring anything new to the expectations and devices of the genre.
While it may alienate some readers, Rebecca Babcock’s WHERE THE SEABIRD SOARS will appeal to many readers of standard romance.
~Dan Accardi for IndieReader