Free Book Friday: A 52-Hertz Whale

It’s Friday, and we’re giving away Free Book Friday’s first #LabF15 title. But first…congratulations to @rrhislib! Send us your email and we’ll get First Man in the mail.

This week, enter to win A 52-Hertz Whale by debut novelists Bill Sommer and Natalie Tilghman. This modern-day epistolary novel is part of our phenomenal 7-book Lab 5th anniversary season, and Publishers Weekly calls the book “a cohesive, emotionally intimate story that sensitively handles loss, grief, accomplishment, and the not-so-simple act of growing up.”

Fourteen-year-old James is worried that the young humpback whale he tracks online has separated from its pod, so naturally he emails Darren, the twenty-something would-be filmmaker who once volunteered in James’s special education program. Of course, Darren is useless on the subject of whales, but he’s got nothing but time, given that the only girl he could ever love dumped him.

Predictably, this thread of emails leads to a lot of bizarre stuff, including a yeti suit, drug smuggling, a graveyard, damaged echolocation, choke holds, emergency dentistry…and maybe ends with something like understanding. See, the thing that binds people together most is their fear that nothing binds them together at all.

If you’d like to win A 52-Hertz Whale, please leave a comment on this post (including your first and last name), or tweet this line: “Free Book Friday! Tweet to win A 52-HERTZ WHALE from @CarolrhodaLab. bit.ly/1OrSN“ Make sure to check the blog next week to see if you’ve won!