ISBN-10: 0-618-19716-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-618-19716-3

It is almost a month late, but here’s my first review for World Oceans Day. The official date, for those behind the times like me, was June 8 – and I highly recommend that you observe it on time next year!!! As a landlocked reader, sometimes books or tv are the only way in which I can learn or experience anything to do with the ocean. With the oil spill which occurred a few months back, I have had to consider just how distant I thought myself from the ocean and reevaluate just how important that body of water is to my daily life! So, whether you are living on the coast enjoying the wonders of the ocean daily, or so far from the ocean that you’ve sort of forgotten what a body of water is, reading a book might be a good step toward reconnecting with what is one of the most fascinating things about our planet.

My recommendation is a book that I found in the nonfiction section of the library, picked up because of an intriguing title, and read because I just couldn’t  not be interested once I read the first page.

In The Fragile Edge, Julia Whitty recounts adventures while diving and exploring in the South Pacific. Whitty’s narrative style is both informative and completely accessible to readers who are not particularly knowledgeable in the same areas as the author. Still, the tone is such that even readers familiar with diving and with the different creatures of the ocean can enjoy the book just as much as someone who is new to that world.

As a reader who falls into the un-knowledgeable category, I found this to be a fascinating read. There is enough information in each chapter that this could be required reading for a course about the ocean, but enough reflection and outright wonder in the author’s tone that the book becomes anything but a dry read. This book falls into the realm of creative nonfiction – a genre I’d never heard of until I took a class called “Introduction to Nonfiction” in college – and it does credit to the genre.

For anyone curious about the ocean, this is a wonderful introductory read and carries enough information that you may want to re-read the book several times just to be sure you’ve absorbed everything. But again I point out that the abundance of information does not make the book dry. The narrative is thoughtful, colorful, sometimes humorous, and offers insight and perspective into a world that most human beings will never really experience.

There is something to be learned, besides practical knowledge, from books such as these and I would highly recommend this for readers. The oceans of the world are wonderfully diverse little worlds of their own, with cultures more foreign than human scope can really imagine, and filled with life that can ignite curiosity with more fervor than anything we see on land. Julia Whitty gives readers a look into this world, reflects on this world and how it relates to us (awkward, air-breathing bipeds that we are) and above all makes it interesting. If I had known that there were books like this out there about the ocean, I would have been hunting them down long before now.

Now that you know, it’s your turn to hunt this book down, and to tell others about books you find that are equally entertaining, informative, or just plain cool!!! Go read, my friends, and think about the awesomeness of the oceans of the world.

Tags: creative nonfiction, Julia Whitty, The Fragile Edge, The Fragile Edge by Julia Whitty, World Oceans Day