Bookshelf Steady As She Goes

Jim Lynch’s Before the Wind

In 2006, master storyteller and acclaimed author, Jim Lynch, ignited the sea spirit in everyone with his first novel, The Highest Tide. An imaginative coming-of-age story, Tide is painted across the rocky-beach and kelp-strewn backdrop of Puget Sound. The story’s hero, Miles, is an inquisitive 13-year-old boy who gives his parents the slip one moonlit night, hops in his kayak, and sets off to explore the critters who are left stranded in local tide pools after the ebb. What Miles finds on his expedition will change his life, forcing celebrity status on a boy who is just trying to deal with the complexities of teendom—including, of course, his infatuation with the girl next door.

Ten years later, Lynch has authored another novel, and while unrelated to the first, it also employs saltwater as his characters’ muse. Before the Wind tells the story of the complex Johannssen family, a unique collection of personalities all interconnected in the world of boatbuilding, sailing, and racing the boats they build. Lynch’s affection for the water is evident in his brusque and beautiful portraits of this fictional family, so full of conflict and admiration for one another and the sea. It doesn’t take long to get there, either. In the opening chapter, he writes:

“We fall for these things, but what we’re slow to grasp is that it’s not the boats but rather those inexplicable moments on the water when time slows. The entire industry is built of a feeling, an emotion.”

Need we say more?

Before the Wind