Author: Katherine L. Holmes
Release
Date: July 16, 2013
Genre: YA Historical Fiction
BLURB
EXCERPT
Though
Dawn hadn’t been on a boat with Oscar before, he was known to be as skilled
with a fishing boat as his brothers.
Sometimes he skipped whole weeks of school during the salmon runs in the
spring. Dawn’s father knew Oscar’s father
well enough and while he would think it was fine if she walked on the boardwalk
with Oscar, being in a boat with him was probably the safer thing. Oscar's brothers spent some evenings at
Toddy’s and Oscar resembled them.
“They bargain about the liquor right from the
boats,” he was saying. “They can toss it overboard if they see the deputy
coming. And say it floated all the way
from British Columbia.”
It was true.
Liquor was often hidden in the fishing nets as Mrs. Helsunk had
said. Especially when sailors were
about. It was said that fishing boats
met larger craft offshore to get the liquor.
“Mrs. Helsunk has a mind to stop that,” Dawn said.
“Her temperance society? I guess my mother didn’t attend.”
Oscar’s mother had sewn up some of the nicest
dresses Dawn had ever seen at church.
Davy Shamison said that some could humble her because she once brought
beer to men at a saloon up in Sitka when they still served it. Oscar’s father had signed up as a sailor on a
ship and when he came back, he brought her out of the saloon and stayed. Toddy knew her from before she was married
and women like Mrs. Helsunk avoided talking to her after church.
“Have you ever gone anywhere on a ship, Oscar?”
“Went to Juneau once.”
Dawn took off her straw hat since the breeze was
buffeting it. She loved to look at the
town from the water, nestled as it was under the masts of spruce. The clouds in the sky were unburdened and the
air had sprays of sunshine in it.
Oscar was saying, “I want to join a ship, maybe next
spring after the salmon run. I want to
see the western coast. I don’t s’pose
I’d like the work they’d give me.”
Still, Oscar had a pleased look on his face, the
expression he usually wore at school.
Because he didn’t go every day, he seemed to enjoy it even if he
wouldn't swallow some subjects as if they were forbidden bottles. Sometimes he did better at geography than
anyone. He was like an otter, pleased to
be on land, his hair shorn and browned up with a streak of sun. His blue eyes weren’t like Captain Helsunk’s;
they were mild as the sky today.
They passed the houses that dotted the shore,
nearing the arm of land that gave passage to the inlet where Dawn’s
grandparents lived. The forest line was
so thick that the inlet wasn’t visible until a boat was angled in its
direction.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Katherine L. Holmes’ first published book was The
House in Windward Leaves, an MG fantasy which became an E-book Finalist in the 2013 New
Generation Indie Book Awards and a Juvenile Fiction Finalist in the National
Indie Excellence Book Awards. Also, she won Prize Americana for her short story
collection, Curiosity Killed the Sphinx and Other Stories, published by
Hollywood Books International. In April
2013, The Wide Awake Loons was released by Silver Knight
Publishing. The Swan Bonnet, a historical novel, will be published
in July, 2013, by GMTA Publishing.
Katherine has worked with used and rare books in the last years. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota.
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