46 pages • 1 hour read
Kate AllenThe Line Tender
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Kate Allen
Kate Allen is a writer from Massachusetts, and The Line Tender is her debut novel. Allen was inspired to write the story by an incident that took place one summer when she was working at a candy shop in Beverly, Massachusetts: A local fisherman caught a great white shark off the coast where she used to swim. Allen studied writing at Bates College. After becoming a teacher in Minneapolis, she took writing courses at the Loft Literary Center, where she completed The Line Tender. Allen is an amateur beekeeper and is interested in the connections between art, science, and conservation. To ensure that the scientific concepts in The Line Tender are accurate, she conducted extensive research with shark biologists and interviewed the original fisherman who caught the great white shark in Beverly.
Scientific Context: Marine Biology
Marine biology is the study of oceanic organisms and environments. It is split into different disciplines based on organisms of study and specific sections of ocean topography. For example, Helen Everhart, Lucy’s mother, was a marine biologist whose area of study was sharks, specifically great white sharks in the coast off Cape Cod. Marine biologists can work for independent research laboratories, universities, and science departments of state governments. Helen worked as a state biologist for Massachusetts and occasionally taught university-level courses with her mentor, Vern Divine. Marine biology is closely tied to marine conservation, which is the research and protection of ocean ecosystems. Shark biologists are particularly concerned with understanding how sharks as apex predators keep ecosystems functioning by “keep[ing] the population of other species in the food chain in proper balance” (“Shark Biologist.” Sea History for Kids). Lucy’s mother was researching the resurgence of great white sharks in Cape Cod prior to her death. Real-life marine biologists, too, are interested in the resurgence of sharks and their effects on the local ecosystem.
Psychological Context: Grief
Grief is the response to a loss—typically a loss due to death or separation. It has emotional, cognitive, philosophical, spiritual, and physical expressions. A popular model of grief is Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, which says that a grieving person typically experiences denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. While this model is helpful for thinking about various emotions that might be caused by grief, scientific evidence does not support it since not every grieving person experiences these stages, nor are each of these stages clearly defined. Psychologist George Bonnano proposed another way to think of grief, which he called the four trajectories of grief—the directions a person’s grieving process can take, rather than universal stages: resilience, recovery, chronic dysfunction, and delayed trauma. Bonnano coined the term “coping ugly,” which means that grief and the grieving process can take many forms; he encouraged public expressions of grief and community grieving practices. The characters in The Line Tender discover the benefits of community grieving, and they also, like Bonnano posits, process their grief in different ways.
