Where the Kelp Forest Grows

A Middle Grade Novel About Divorce, Scuba Diving, and Choosing Who You Become

von Isaiah Christopher

202 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Jordan is twelve, and he has gotten very good at being invisible.In a house where the wrong sentence starts a fight that runs for three days, invisible works. His parents have been divorced for years. That was supposed to be the end of it. Instead there are two sets of rules, two versions of every story, and two adults who each need him to agree that the other one is the problem.On the last day of school, watching a boy humiliate his friend, Jordan does something with his hands before he can think it through. The whole town decides he is a hero. He knows better.Then his brother calls. Wes is nineteen, fixes boats down the coast, and teaches people to scuba dive on the side. He does not ask Jordan what happened at the tennis courts. He asks if Jordan wants to get in the water.What follows is a summer of pool sessions, cold Pacific water, and a first real dive in a Monterey Bay kelp forest, where visibility ends at thirty feet in every direction and nothing happening above the surface can reach him. Down there the rules do not change depending on who is angry. Breathe one way and you rise. Breathe another way and you settle. Whatever happens is because of something you did.Jordan is going to need that. By August the fight between his parents has grown teeth, and both of them want him to pick a side.Who this is forThis is a story for the kid who is tired. Not the kid in the first hard month after a separation, but the one three or four years in, who has learned to read a room before walking into it and to keep his opinions to himself because having them costs too much.It does not hand that kid a list of rules. It shows him a boy his own age doing three difficult things: ending a phone call that has turned into something no kid should be holding, handing a grown-up problem back to the grown-up it belongs to, and refusing to keep a secret from one parent for the other. None of them are easy, and each one costs him something. They work anyway.Nobody gets fixed. Jordan's mother gets partway to an apology. His father gets further than that. Neither of them turns into a different person. What changes is Jordan, who stops carrying the part that was never his to carry.DetailsAges 10 to 12, grades 5 through 7181 pages, 19 chapters, roughly 36,500 wordsFirst person, present tense, short chapters for readers who stall out on long onesA novel, not a workbook or a picture book. No illustrations, no activities, no discussion questions.Content notes: one act of schoolyard violence with real consequences, a school suspension, and ongoing adult conflict about money and custody. No profanity, no romance, no substance use.Written by a scuba instructor with more than twenty years of teaching experience. The diving is accurate, including what a kid that age is and is not allowed to do underwater.It is a book about a boy, his brother, and cold water, and about the one decision that was his the whole time.

• Themen: Kinder, Jugendliche und Bildung Romane, Erzählungen, Tatsachenberichte Familiengeschichten /Geschichten übers Zuhause
• ISBN: 9781088103913
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 08.08.2026
• Größe: 216 x 140 mm
• Verlag: Cattail Cove Press