The Highest Tide
From the Times online comes a review of a book with a squiddy bent:
THE HIGHEST TIDE
by Jim Lynch
(reviewed by neel mukherjee)
… Miles is another precocious child narrator. Significantly undersized for his age, he is often mistaken for a ten-year-old. His great gift is of observation of marine life on the mud banks where he lives. While his friend Phelps smokes his mother’s Kents, plays the air guitar and obsesses about sex and women’s breasts, Miles, a beguiling geek whose hero is Rachel Carson and who has read everything about marine biology that he can lay his hands on, roams the flats during low tide, collecting clams and geoducks (burrowing clams) and observing the miraculous wonder of ocean life.
His is informed wonder, though: this boy knows the difference between Moroteuthis (clubhook squid) and Architeuthis (giant squid) and the spawning habits of butterfly squid. When he discovers that rarest creature of the deep, a giant squid, first a television crew, then religious cults and finally an entire media circus invade his hitherto unknown corner of the world. With each of Miles’s sightings of other rarities — ragfish, oarfish — his celebrity grows, till everyone is convinced that the ocean is trying to tell human beings something through this boy.
You can also read an interview with the book’s author.