Norman Tuttle is, in a word, awkward. He falls off his father's fishing boat into icy Alaskan waters. He quietly sweats on gorgeous Laura Magruder at the school dance. He gets himself on the bad side of Leonard Kopinski, an overgrown eighth-grader who shaves. As Norman contemplates a long and lonely adolescence on the Last Frontier, he's sure there's more to life than being the klutziest kid in Alaska. In 15 closely linked stories that follow Norman from age 13 to going-on 16, Tom Bodett combines rugged Alaskan adventure with a warm and funny story of a boy who may not be as lonely as he thinks.
Excerpts
From the book
...
To Begin With
Norman Tuttle grew up in a place called Alaska. You've probably heard of it--the Last Frontier, all that stuff. I bet you've never heard of Norman Tuttle. He was just a kid there. Kids in Alaska don't know they're growing up on the Last Frontier. It's just what they see on the license plates, and it's something tourists like to say a lot because they've never been around so many mountains and moose before.
It's not like Alaska isn't wilderness--it mostly is. But most Alaskans don't live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It's just like anyplace else, only with mountains and moose. At least that's what it feels like if you grow up there like Norman Tuttle did.
Norman's dad was a fisherman and the family owned their own boat, the Francine, named after Norman's mom. The boat was wooden and usually smelled bad. Fishing boats smell that way no matter who you name them after. Fishing was a busy job. Uncle Stu and Norman's dad were gone a lot of the time from May to September chasing after salmon. Then in the fall they would change the gear on the boat from nets to longlines and they'd fish for halibut, then cod, until deep into the winter. The boat always needed something: props, rudders, engines, radar, paint and putty. It kept his dad and Uncle Stu pretty busy even when they weren't gone fishing. It seemed to Norman that his dad had a lot more time for fishing than he had for anything else.
Norman's mom did everything moms do, only probably more of it, like most women who marry fishermen. Norman helped with the housework and keeping track of the littler kids, and if anybody asked her about him, she would have to say he was a good kid.
Fishing was a pretty decent way to make a living and Norman had everything he needed and a few things he didn't, including his little brothers, Franky and Caleb, and middle sister, Jessie. Their house was a normal, square, straight-up and-down-house-type house on a dirt road on the edge of town. Norman had his own bedroom, which looked toward the bay and the mountains across it and was probably one of the most beautiful views on the planet Earth. If you were into views.
Norman's best friend, Stanley, lived just down the road. They'd spend most of their time together ranging through the fields of fireweed playing war, or jigging for flounder down in the boat harbor, or riding their bikes to the Saturday movies. It was a normal childhood for a place like that, and it's hard to say exactly when it ended.
It's like driving to Alaska from someplace else. You get to Canada first, which looks about like where you just were, only now it's called Canada. Then after a while it starts to look like something else again. There are fewer buildings, more mountains, and blue glaciers. Tundra bogs and wildflowers and big, goofy-looking moose appear alongside the road, and then pretty soon a sign comes up that says Welcome to Alaska, the Last Frontier. Where does one thing end and the next one start? Wherever they say it does.
It's the same thing with growing up. One day you're a kid going along like you always do with everything looking the same as it's been, and then something happens to you. This is what happened on the Last Frontier to a kid named Norman Tuttle.
Lost and Found
Not many things come easy when you're thirteen, but Norman didn't have much trouble falling off his dad's fishing boat. Actually, he was pretty much designed to succeed at just such a thing. Having grown over six inches since Christmas, he found that his arms and legs stretched into...
Reviews
...
Norman is at that awkward age when his body is growing too fast for his brain to keep up. He's grounded so much he feels like a prisoner in a work-release program. He unwittingly finds it easier to offend Leonard Kopinski, class bully, than to impress Laura Magruder, girl of his dreams. Tom Bodett's 15 separate but related stories weave a tale of humor, adventure, and coming-of-age into a tapestry of one boy's journey to manhood. Bodett's laid-back narration gives the listener the feeling of a storyteller telling tales of an adolescence that was hard to live but is pleasantly warm to remember. N.E.M. (c) AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
Digital Rights Information
OverDrive WMA Audiobook
Burn to CD:
Not permitted
Transfer to device:
Permitted (6 times)
Transfer to Apple® device:
Permitted
Public performance:
Not permitted
File-sharing:
Not permitted
Peer-to-peer usage:
Not permitted
All copies of this title, including those transferred to portable devices and other media, must be deleted/destroyed at the end of the lending period.
