Hear Linda read from her YA novel Namako: Sea Cucumber
Namako is a novel about a child’s virgin dance with the truth with lies and secrets. Each new violation of trust is like a footprint on the tundra, refining the way the child walks through life. Los Angeles Times
Namako: Sea Cucumber may be classified (or hastily genre-fied) as a Young Adult Novel, but it sure doesn’t pull any punches. Namako is a coming-of-age story set in a defiantly real world. In it, the naive and small universe of the child is conquered by a reality in turns sublime and beautiful, horrific and wondrous. These young, rural children could never have imagined a world so expansive or dangerous, and yet, it is precisely this world, the world of adult-sobering reality, which is the world of Namako: Sea Cucumber. Not the fairy tale forest, not Elvedon, not Tamriel, or Narnia, but terrene. In the passage below, the young main character is meeting in secret with a childhood friend, David, in a small igloo, for he is about to announce his departure. A strange man in Tokyo has invited David to live with him under the guise that he once knew David’s father.
