The Extremely High Tide

The Extremely High Tide by Kir Fox and M. Shelley Coats is a strange seaside story for 9 year olds about a girl who understands the ocean far better than she understands her classmates.

What happens

Topsea has one pier. It is endless. The book tells you this quite calmly and then walks you along it for a while, asking whether you might in fact have started at the far end without noticing.

Talise is the town's only bathymetrist, which means she studies the bottom of the sea. She can tell you what next Saturday's tide will be (Severely Low, with a threat of Wildcard) and how many days until Seaweed Season. She turns up to a beachcombing lesson in a full wet suit, air tank and flippers, and says blurp blop bloop through her regulator when the teacher points out that they're only picking up shells.

Rubber ducks keep appearing wherever she goes, with their eyes rubbed off, which everyone agrees is dangerous.

Here's the thing that makes this more than a joke about a peculiar town. Talise finds other children genuinely hard to read. Her therapist has given her a foam sea blob to squeeze when she feels anxious, and suggested she think of her classmates as speaking different dialects, so Talise works them out one at a time. Eager and brave. Considerate and overwhelmed. Clever and overbearing. One of them she still can't place, because she never knows when that girl is telling the truth.

When the class pairs up, everybody reaches for a best friend and Talise reaches for her sea blob, which she's left at home.

She says she doesn't mind working alone. Then she reminds herself again that she doesn't mind.

Off on her own, she digs a corked bottle out of the wet sand. Inside is a scrap of bark with writing on it, and that's where the real trouble starts.

If you've got a reader who has ever felt like everyone else was handed a rulebook nobody gave them, there's a lot in Talise for them. The weirdness is the joke here, and she isn't.

What to read next

For another town that plays its oddness perfectly straight, try Who Could That Be at This Hour. Lemony Snicket is nearly thirteen, apprenticed to a chaperone who comes dead last on a list of fifty-two, in a place called Stain'd-by-the-Sea that sits beside a sea somebody drained on purpose.