Hurricane/Storm Season has hit early. We usually don't get down pours like we had yesterday until starting in June. It was raining so hard when I left Montessori at the end of the school day that I had to walk in ankle deep running water to get to my car. I wasn't too upset about my clothes since I had already been nailed by a car going by at lunch time - with the contents of a mud puddle. Thank goodness for heaters in cars - I dried myself off on the way to Subway in Red Hook. After school I drove through the rain to get to UVI to pick up a box of books and watched the poor tourists making their way back to the cruise ships from downtown Charlotte Amalie. The drains couldn't handle the water and the side of the street they were on was so full of water it was lapping up onto the sidewalks. One poor lady lost her flip-flop in the water that was running across the street as she waded through ankle deep. While I was at UVI Mrs. Rymer, one of the women I worked with in the library and who has lived here all her adult life, said we are in for a bad hurricane season this year. I pray she is wrong, but signs do indicate that is true.

It is fitting that I read a book about oceans with the weather like it is. I didn't pick it up because of the title, No More Pranks, but for the cover. It shows the front of a kayak from a paddler's position, with another kayaker in the distance. I have always wanted to try kayaking so I thought - why not, it is an Orca Soundings title and they are a quick read - intended for reluctant readers. 100 pages later I was satiated with a credible, though a bit didactic, tale by Monique Polak about a teenager who is sent to spend the summer with his uncle after having pulled a nasty prank on the vice principal. He pretended to by the vp and called into one of those sex therapist phone lines and said he had a foot fetish (the vp measures the girl's platform shoes with a ruler!). The cool part of the book was the information about the whales and the kayak tours to see them in their natural habitat.

The Orca Soundings books are great additions to any YA collection that has a need for quick easy reads - isn't that every one of them? Orca is my favorite Canadian publisher and I have been enjoying their books for years. Alone at Ninety Foot by Katherine Holubitsky is my favorite of the Orca novels. I think her newest one is The Mountain That Walked, but didn't get a review copy of it so I haven't read it yet.