Tortoise For The Queen Of Tonga »

JULIA WHITTY's first book on oceans, The Fragile Edge, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal Award, the PEN USA Award, and the Kiriyama Prize. Her cover articles have appeared in Harper's Magazine and Mother Jones, where she is an environmental correspondent and blogger at Blue Marble.

Bringing a unique perspective and a singular voice to contemporary fiction, A TORTOISE FOR THE QUEEN OF TONGA features lush, poignant stories about the natural world. Here are mammals, historical figures, everyday people who discover the liberating properties of memory and knowledge in the face of captivity and loneliness. We meet a forlorn tortoise forced to live among humans. We witness orcas at Ocean World staging a revolt, using celibacy as their weapon. In a French cave, a young computer animator draws parallels between Cro-Magnon and modern women. One story even travels to heaven, where Charles Darwin seeks the source of human happiness.
Whitty joins her authority about wildlife and her rich imagination to spectacular effect. Drawing on twenty years' experience with making nature documentaries, she takes readers inside the minds of animals and people struggling to overcome their limitations. In a voice as magical as it is informed, A TORTOISE FOR THE QUEEN OF TONGA bridges the mythical and the mundane, the animal and the human. Julia Whitty is a brilliant new storyteller in American short fiction.

Publishers Weekly

Promising, elegant, yet of mixed quality, this short story collection takes full advantage of the author's intimate perspective on the natural world, a by-product, no doubt, of her experience as a documentary filmmaker for PBS, National Geographic and the like. The collection's best stories depict the intersection of the human world and the natural one with grace and drama. In "Senti's Last Elephant," an African safari guide introduces wealthy American tourists to the violence of the animal kingdom, to devastating effect. In other stories, she embraces (probably gleefully) what Ruskin termed the pathetic fallacy: ascribing human emotions and sympathies to the natural world. The giant tortoise of the title story, for example, possesses "a heart that had swelled insupportably from nearly two centuries of loneliness." In "Lucifer's Alligator," some denizens of an aquatic theme park become revolutionaries, turning their desire for freedom into a refusal to perform tricks or, more important, to mate. Except for readers with an enormous capacity to suspend disbelief, these fanciful conceits don't fully succeed. Still, Whitty has a fine, experienced eye whether she's writing of Tonga or Venice, the locales come alive and an equally keen ear; her prose is supple and poetic. The stories could benefit from more conflict of the human variety, but this is a solid collection that demonstrates a devotion to the natural world rarely seen in contemporary fiction. West Coast author tour. (Apr. 3) Forecast: Whitty has written and produced over 50 nature documentaries, making this the perfect handsell for Discovery Channel addicts. A witty, all-text jacket will catch the eye of more exclusively literary browsers, who may have read Whitty's work in Harper's, Ploughshares or Zoetrope. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.