Parker’s Pages: The Highest Tide

When 2025 finally hit my calendar, I was chomping at the bit to find my first book of the year. I needed look no further than the ever-growing stack of Puget Sound authors at my bedside.

The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch (paperback)

The Evergreen Echo

If you are looking for a novel to satisfy your craving for a summer adventure, The Highest Tide by Jim Lynch (2005) has you covered. This novel enraptured me from start to finish, with its effervescent descriptions of animal life, the lovable main character, Miles, and a narrative voice so strong it had me floored the whole way through. And the fact that this was Lynch’s first novel had me gob smacked. As a creative writer myself, I felt like I could take a highlighter and pen to the pages with no problem; I’ll be drafting my essay singing The Highest Tide’s praises if you need me.

Our main character is a thirteen-year-old boy named Miles, a short, ocean-obsessed insomniac who knows the water of the bay better than anyone. I fell in love with Miles right away; he’s an awkward teenager who stumbles breathlessly through his factoids about sea life. It’s hard not to adore him. I saw some of my own boyhood in Miles’ adventures—hours spent unsupervised, chasing down animals and going on adventures with dubious amounts of danger involved. Of course, my area of expertise was the High Desert in California, while Miles’ is the beach, the spit, and the cool water of the bay, but there was something familiar in it all the same.

Miles’ summer takes a turn for the weird after he discovers a strange creature on the shore of the beach outside his home, launching him into the spotlight of his hometown. He seems to keep stumbling into unusual things, even as he desperately tries to escape the attention.

“It wasn’t that I was starting to feel that I actually had some higher calling, it’s that I’d begun to feel as though I’d received a bigger role than I’d auditioned for.” (46)

Beyond Miles’ strange discoveries, this book is also a beautiful coming-of-age story. He starts the book stuck—stuck in the same routine, but also at the same height. He tries to cling to his present, to his friendships, to his crush on Angie Stegner, and to his parents, but all the while we can see big changes ahead for Miles.

We see him strung along, not just by the random things that seem to keep happening around him, but also from the normal changes that all teens go through: romantic awakenings, learning that the adults around you aren’t indestructible or all-knowing, and discovering that you are not the only one who doesn’t have it all figured out. In hindsight, I wish this book had come to me in my own teenage years, when I was going through the same things and asking a lot of the same questions that Miles asks.

Me with a crab at Puget Sound!

Eric Enbom

Jim Lynch is a Washington native and you can tell. This book practically reeks of the Puget Sound, of Olympia, and the clear water of the bay; you can hear, taste, and feel it on each page. This novel was written by someone who knows the Sound like an old friend, and although I’m not a natural born Seattleite, I could picture each place described in this novel with sharp clarity. Be they skittling crabs, spitting geoducks, or a squirming sea slug, this book brings the animals of the bay to life. And after spending a good bit of my 2024 summer on the beaches of the Sound, I can say with confidence that this book gets it all exactly right. There is so much to see.

If you’re looking for a national bestseller to keep you on your toes and remind you of warm, childhood summers, this is definitely the one for you! And if you love it as much as I did, then stay tuned, as I’m sure more Jim Lynch novels will find their way into Parker’s Pages.