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Grayson | 
 enlarge | Author: Lynne Cox
Publisher: Harvest Books
Category: Book
List Price: $13.00
Buy New: $2.47
You Save: $10.53 (81%)
New (36) Used (24) from $2.01
Avg. Customer Rating:  40 reviews
Sales Rank: 11460
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5 x 0.7
ISBN: 0156034670
Dewey Decimal Number: 797.200979491
EAN: 9780156034678
ASIN: 0156034670
Publication Date: February 4, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
This captivating bestseller tells the true story of a miraculous encounter between a teenaged girl and a baby whale off the coast of California. It was the dark of early morning; Lynne was swimming her last half mile back to the pier after a long workout when she became aware that something was swimming with her. The ocean was charged with energy as if a squall was moving in; whatever it was felt large enough to be a white shark coursing beneath her body.
In fact, it was a baby gray whale following alongside her. Lynne quickly realized that if she swam back to the pier, the young calf would follow her onto shore and die from collapsed lungs. On the other hand, if Lynne didn’t find the mother whale, the baby would suffer from dehydration and starve to death.
Something so enormous—the mother whale would be at least fifty feet long—suddenly seemed very small in the vast Pacific Ocean. How could Lynne possibly find her?
This is the story—part mystery, part magical tale—of what happened.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 35 more reviews...
 Hello, and thanks for all the fish! April 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While listening to this tale as an audiobook, I was surprised to be sitting at the edge of my recliner! For a very simple premise, Lynne Cox crafted a plot with a lot of excitement.
I was touched by the sense of communion between the human swimmer and the baby whale, each of them vulnerable and exposed.
The communication and intelligence of the whales in this story, plus a mega-pod of dophins, made me think of the line, "Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!" the title of Douglas Adams' fourth book in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. (Where Wonko the scientist posits that dolphins were the actual creators of planet Earth.)
I now own Grayson in an audio format and as a hardcover book, and I consider it a treasure.
A great true story, written with love for the sea. April 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
A sweet story for any age. True, and the information given is stunning. Imagine swimming with a whale! Would be good to read aloud to a 9-12 year old, but I cry everytime with joy at the ending.
Great book to share April 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I love the ocean and found this book beautiful and moving. It describes the experience of meeting a baby gray whale and then trying to help it find its mother. There is some wonderfully descriptive writing of the ocean, and facts added in that give it more meat. It also gives lots of advice and encouragement, not to give up, to follow your dreams and that anything is possible. We bought the audio book for a family vacation and my 4 year old and 7 year old both enjoyed the story very much. They are excited to attend a grunion run and are also excited about whales.
"Something had brought us together. Something much bigger than the two of us." February 9, 2008
12 out of 15 found this review helpful
(3.5 stars) When seventeen-year-old Lynne Cox is finishing her morning swim between Seal Beach pier and the San Gabriel River jetty, south of Los Angeles, she is hungry and cold. It is March, and the water temperature is in the fifties, but Lynne, a serious open-water swimmer, is in training, regularly doing three-hour workouts in the cold Pacific. When she discovers that a baby gray whale is following her to shore, she realizes that the baby must have lost its mother. Remaining in the water, alone except for the whale, she continues swimming on the chance that the baby, whom she names Grayson, will hear its mother vocalizing or that the mother will find them.
For the next couple of hours, she and the whale swim the one-and-a-half miles from the pier to an offshore oil rig in deep, often rough, water. The whale is confused, often diving deep and disappearing for ten minutes or more at a time, and Lynne begins to despair. When he finally disappears for a very long time and shows no signs of resurfacing, Lynne, close to hypothermia and discouraged, decides to head back to shore, alone.
By now this story is so well known that it gives nothing away to say eventually there is a happy resolution. For Lynne Cox, however, there is a much bigger story than "just" the reunion of the baby and its mother. For her, this experience has been a test of her strength, her will, and her faith, resulting, finally, in her personal triumph.
A morality tale about the interconnections of man and nature, Grayson is full of the "truths" drawn by a sensitive seventeen-year-old who sees the baby whale in human terms. She thinks only positive thoughts, sending mental messages to the baby whale and to his mother, telling them that she will help them find each other. She explains that "there are two ways of thinking--one of possibility and hope, the other of doubt and impossibility," adding that sometimes "the things that make the least sense to other people make the most sense to me."
Thirty years have passed since this experience, the author tells us, and she believes she learned much about life from it, never doubting her romantic conclusions or the words-to-live-by that she presents throughout her narrative. Though the author originally wrote this book for adults, its popularity among junior high students speaks to its appeal. The world she describes is not the nature of "tooth and claw" or the survival of the fittest. It is a world in which humans can interact with nature through positive thoughts and energy, and those, in turn, can reunite a baby whale and its presumably loving mother. n Mary Whipple
 TOO MUCH HYPERBOLE December 3, 2007
What should have been a SHORT story, was stretched into a book, and it didn't work for me. Not only did I think that the author inserted too many other incidents into a couple of hours, but she also threw in too many similes.
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