Synopsis: Brady Parks faces a life-changing moral dilemma in this coming-of-age story of redemption. Set in a tiny fishing/crabbing town, the story follows Brady, a 9th grader who is called to help in the search for a woman and her young child who have gone missing while kayaking.
The story isn't as much about his heroic attempt to rescue the child. Rather, it's about the moral obligation to "do the right thing" in the face of losing everything - your friends, your family's respect, and your freedom. More than that, it's a story about guilt and redemption, loss and acceptance, trust and responsibility.
Brady learns that harboring secrets and trying to face the unimaginable on one's own can only do harm, and that revealing the truth, while painful and scary, has the very real power to set everyone free from the prisons they create in their own minds.
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Pages: 208
Level: easy/intermediate
Author's website
The Sequel to this book is The Journey Back.
Opening paragraphs of The Red Kayak:
After all this time, I still ask myself: Was it my fault?
Maybe. Maybe not.
Either way, I wonder what would have happened if I'd called out a warning. Or kept my mouth shut later. Would J.T. and Digger still be my best friends? Would the DiAngelos still be living next door?
One thing's for sure: If none of this had happened, I'd be out there crabbing every day, baiting my pots in the morning and pulling them in after school. Fall's a great time for catching crabs before the females head south and the males burrow into the mud. I could fix the engine on the boat easy if I wanted. It's not broken like I told Dad. Probably nothing but some air in the lines from settin' there so long. I could bleed the engine tonight, set my alarm for 4 a.m., and be on the river before the sun was up over the tree line.
Don't think it didn't bother me, the way those traps sat all summer, stacked four deep against the back of Dad's tool-shed. Some never even got hosed off, they were stashed in such a hurry. Be a lot of work to clean 'em up and rezinc them, too, so they don't corrode. In just a few days, though, I could have four rows of twenty-five sunken pots out there, each one marked with a fresh-painted orange buoy, and all one hundred of those pots soaked and baited with razor clams. Afternoons, I could be hauling in crabs hand over fist, and right now, a bushel of big number-one jimmies would fetch me seventy dollars from the wholesaler -- maybe even more, since the price of crabs has gone through the roof.
But, this is all so complicated. I can't go back out on the water. Not yet anyway. I can't help it; I keep asking myself, What if this, what if that? And then in my mind I see that red kayak...
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