Ice Whale
“Hearing majestic whale vocalizations, listeners will be spellbound by the final story in George’s saga of two hundred years in the life of a bowhead whale and its relationship with humankind…Narrator Christina Moore is equal to the task of bringing the generations of Toozak’s descendants and their contemporaries to life.…The natural world plays a big part in this story, and Moore’s elegant voice graces it with the import it deserves.”
AudioFile
From the most celebrated children's nature writer of our time comes a posthumous new novel in the tradition of her Newbery Award-winning Julie of the Wolves.
In 1848 in Barrow, Alaska, a young Eskimo boy witnesses a rare sight—the birth of a bowhead, or ice whale, that he calls Siku. But when he unwittingly guides Yankee whalers to a pod of bowhead whales, all the whales are killed. For this act, the boy receives a curse of banishment. Through the generations, this curse is handed down. Siku, the ice whale, returns year after year, in reality and dreams, to haunt each descendant. The curse is finally broken when a daughter recognizes and saves the whale, and he in turn saves her. Told in alternating voices, both human and whale, Jean Craighead George's last novel is an ambitious and touching take on the interconnectedness of humans, animals, and the earth they depend on.
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