The Surfer (American Edition)

Reviews
Jessie meets Marinia, a strange and beautiful surfer who possesses a kind of mesmerizing power over her, coaxing abilities out of her that had been hidden before. Jessie's friend Nick Stieveson knows with frightening certainty that Marina is an immortal who plans to exact a terrible revenge on him, just as she has done with every generation of the Stieveson men since his great-grandfather. In this well-written thriller, the secondary characters sustain the framework, providing background information that explains the events. The cover art will appeal to teens attracted by the horror genre. And once inside the taut and evocative story, readers will become immersed in the ultimate challenge of good v. evil.
From The School Library Journal
Some of us stroll the Virginia Beach Oceanfront and see surf.
Others stroll the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, see surf and surmise: What if there were a witch in the water? Folks in the surmise category are probably writers.
``It was a stormy day, and the surf was tremendous,'' explains Charlottesville author Linda Cargill, 40, in a telephone interview. ``I looked out to sea and just imagined that a mysterious, phantom surfer was riding a gigantic wave up to the shore. These things pop into my head.''
She has often visited Hampton Roads with her lawyer husband, Gary, and son Kenny, 11. One of those excursions contributed the surreal image at the center of her new young-adult novel set in Virginia Beach and Norfolk, The Surfer (Scholastic, 195 pp., $3.50). Not far from the Norwegian Lady, a stranger goes airborne:
As if that perfect balance was not enough for such an expert surfer, the girl now lifted one leg up from the board and rode the cresting wave with only one knee bent. And then, incredibly, she thrust the leg out behind her, balancing herself first on her hands and then again on one foot. It was as if the stranger were a ballerina who could walk and dance on water.
It's a haunting, action-crammed tale for teens about a family curse that goes back to the 19th century and gale-force Scandinavian sea-captain forebears. As if protagonist Jessie Rogers didn't already have troubles enough, with her parents' impending divorce and the sudden mood swings of her boyfriend, swim-team star Nick Stieveson. Bummer.
``Kenny advises me on lingo and things,'' Cargill reports of her editorially useful son. ``He thinks it's neat that I write about places he visited. He likes to see his name on the acknowledgments page.''
Actually, he would prefer the hero, or at the very least the villain, to be called Kenny. Kenny is quick to tell his Mom what is interesting for kids and what isn't. Awesome.
Linda Cargill is a direct, confiding woman with a background in classical archaeology from Bryn Mawr and English from Duke University. She has been one to surmise stories from childhood; growing up in Bethel Park, Pa., she illustrated them and distributed copies to neighbors. As a senior in high school, Cargill won honorable mention in the Atlantic Monthly Short Story Contest for Young Writers for a yarn about her father.
By the time she was out of college, having acquired graduate degrees in English and English education at Duke and the University of Virginia, she knew how to write; but it would take her years more to learn how to sell.
``I wrote historical novels about the ancient world,'' Cargill notes, ``and I got real frustrated trying to get them published. I thought you simply wrote what you liked to read, and then somebody automatically bought it. Wrong.
``You have to target a market.''
In 1991 a small press, Cheops Books of Charlottesville, printed her first-person novel about teenaged Helen of Troy, To Follow the Goddess. Kirkus, the influential review service, pronounced it a ``spirited page-turner'' and ``a delightful read.'' One savvy agent who saw the review advised Cargill to stop scribbling about monsters in the ancient world and start writing about them in our own era.
Enter such up-to-date specters as the phantom surfer - and lucrative mainstream publishers like Scholastic Inc. of New York, Toronto, London, Auckland and Sydney.
``Now I don't research the material so much as the location,'' says Cargill, who travels about the country with her family in a van each summer, seeking out likely settings for saleable stories.
Next year HarperCollins will publish Hang Loose, concerning a spooky lighthouse on St. Simon's Island off the Georgia coast; already in the works is another Scholastic entry, Pool Party, featuring criminal activity around a north Florida haunted house.
``And they only take several months each to write,'' adds Cargill, ``as opposed to two or three years for a historical novel. They keep me entertained when I'm writing them. I never quite know how they're going to end.
``It pops into my head as I'm going along.''
Fun to write and fun to read. Surf's up, and so are her spirits. Scholarly Linda Cargill has broken into popular print with a splash.
Bill Ruehlmann, The Virginian-Pilot
Linda Cargill raises the dead, and her 11-year-old son Kenny loves it. She's the local mind behind the spooky genre books some of us read as pre-teens - books with titles like The Girl in the Mirror or Blood Red Roses. The logical step after Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, the young adult genre books were camp-fire ghost stories in book form, the ones that made our adolescent skin pucker in goosebumps. Sometimes, after a couple of week's anticipation, the teacher would pull these from the box of books ordered through Scholastic, and we'd gaze at the glossy cover in excitement. It was Scholastic that published Cargill's The Surfer.
It's been a long time coming. After a six-week stint teaching at Fluvanna High School, Cargill had written a full 10 years before she got published, toiling away at her home office. Back then, Cargill wasn't in the boogey biz; she was writing historical novels for adults. "I was always always following information in places like Writers Digest Magazine - you know 'write what you like to read,'" she says. She spent two years penning To Follow the Goddess, a historical novel about the Trojan War from Helen's vantage point. Then she spent another five years sending the manuscript to New York City (the U.S. capital of publishing houses) before finding a publisher in 1991 right here at home: the local Cheops Books. [Cheops has since folded.] While far from a commercial blockbuster, the book garnered one very important review - that of Kirkus Reviews. The respected journal (oft used by libraries to determine which tomes to buy) declared To Follow the Goddess a "spirited page-turner" and "a delightful read" that "bubbl[ed] until the last huzzah."
Cargill not only credits that review with "every sale of the Goddess novel," but says it led her to the spooky tales she now weaves. An editor read the review and suggested, with Cargill's flair for suspense, she might try her pen at young adult suspense thrillers - a more lucrative writing avenue. Cargill had never even read an adult suspense thriller.
But she studied the genre and it paid off, Scholastic picked up The Surfer, Cargill's first young adult release in the U.S. [Cora Verlag published a German edition of Cargill's earlier The Witch of Pungo. It was never released here.] She says comparing the young adult books with adult historical novels is like comparing apples and oranges. History was her "original love," she says; she studied classical and near-Eastern archeology and ancient art at her two years at Bryn Mawr. "You might say it's my scholarly pre-occupation," she says. Of young adult books, "They're fun, light. They entertain me, and my son [11-year old Kenny] likes them." You can still see Cargill's love for ancient history in The Surfer; her own Lady Ingrid has echoes of The Odyssey's Circe, a goddess who turned men into animals - quite literally. Kenny, meanwhile, serves as her "special consultant."
Cargill finds the best of the genre - the cream of the creepy -- to be the books that focus on the just plain spooky. She's disturbed by the lurid violence given to her fellow Y.A. Writers, like Christopher Pike. "[His books] are more violent, more bloody - updated, maybe not for the better. He even tries to introduce sex - just in terms of the genre." The Surfer, for example, has one chaste kiss. Cargill's own work hearkens back to the grandma of the genre, Lois Duncan, who could raise my ponytail with just a ghostly whisper, not a bloody corpse.
Now to sate the pre-teen in all of us: does Cargill believe in ghosts? "I don't disbelieve in them," she says carefully. "There are certain things that seem more real than others."
For example: Cargill tells the story of an incident that happened to her own mother. Her mom woke up in the middle of the night with the feeling that something was wrong. Her throat burned inexplicably. When she awoke the next morning, she discovered her next-door neighbor had committed suicide ... by swallowing bleach.
And while Cargill seemed unfazed at the goosebumps that the bleach story induced in this writer, she did say, "it's easy to spook yourself out [writing these books]. You look over your shoulder when you're alone ... I've started locking my basement at night."
With The Surfer's release, Cargill is now riding the crest of Y.A. Publishdom. Next year will bring the release of two more of her young adult suspense thrillers, Pool Party (through Scholastic) and Hang Loose (through Harper Collins).
She researched the two in her customary style, combining research with family vacations. For Hang Loose and Pool Party, the Cargill family travelled to St. Simon's Island in Georgia. "It's a spooky place, with a haunted lighthouse ... [The Island is] filled with oak trees covered in Spanish moss," she says. The haunted lighthouse would become a key element in Hang Loose; Cargill drew on and embellished local legends about the lighthouse and the ghost of the pipe-smoking keeper. Did she visit the haunted tower? "No, but my husband did .. .I was too much of a coward," she says. And, no, it wasn't the phantom which kept Cargill away - she's afraid of heights.
She's hoping to write an adult suspense thriller next. She's still "shopping for ideas." The Cargill family may have to go on sabbatical again.
Jennifer Niesslein, C-Ville Weekly.
Jessie meets Marinia, a strange and beautiful surfer who possesses a kind of mesmerizing power over her, coaxing abilities out of her that had been hidden before. Jessie's friend Nick Stieveson knows with frightening certainty that Marina is an immortal who plans to exact a terrible revenge on him, just as she has done with every generation of the Stieveson men since his great-grandfather. In this well-written thriller, the secondary characters sustain the framework, providing background information that explains the events. The cover art will appeal to teens attracted by the horror genre. And once inside the taut and evocative story, readers will become immersed in the ultimate challenge of good v. evil.
From The School Library Journal
Some of us stroll the Virginia Beach Oceanfront and see surf.
Others stroll the Virginia Beach Oceanfront, see surf and surmise: What if there were a witch in the water? Folks in the surmise category are probably writers.
``It was a stormy day, and the surf was tremendous,'' explains Charlottesville author Linda Cargill, 40, in a telephone interview. ``I looked out to sea and just imagined that a mysterious, phantom surfer was riding a gigantic wave up to the shore. These things pop into my head.''
She has often visited Hampton Roads with her lawyer husband, Gary, and son Kenny, 11. One of those excursions contributed the surreal image at the center of her new young-adult novel set in Virginia Beach and Norfolk, The Surfer (Scholastic, 195 pp., $3.50). Not far from the Norwegian Lady, a stranger goes airborne:
As if that perfect balance was not enough for such an expert surfer, the girl now lifted one leg up from the board and rode the cresting wave with only one knee bent. And then, incredibly, she thrust the leg out behind her, balancing herself first on her hands and then again on one foot. It was as if the stranger were a ballerina who could walk and dance on water.
It's a haunting, action-crammed tale for teens about a family curse that goes back to the 19th century and gale-force Scandinavian sea-captain forebears. As if protagonist Jessie Rogers didn't already have troubles enough, with her parents' impending divorce and the sudden mood swings of her boyfriend, swim-team star Nick Stieveson. Bummer.
``Kenny advises me on lingo and things,'' Cargill reports of her editorially useful son. ``He thinks it's neat that I write about places he visited. He likes to see his name on the acknowledgments page.''
Actually, he would prefer the hero, or at the very least the villain, to be called Kenny. Kenny is quick to tell his Mom what is interesting for kids and what isn't. Awesome.
Linda Cargill is a direct, confiding woman with a background in classical archaeology from Bryn Mawr and English from Duke University. She has been one to surmise stories from childhood; growing up in Bethel Park, Pa., she illustrated them and distributed copies to neighbors. As a senior in high school, Cargill won honorable mention in the Atlantic Monthly Short Story Contest for Young Writers for a yarn about her father.
By the time she was out of college, having acquired graduate degrees in English and English education at Duke and the University of Virginia, she knew how to write; but it would take her years more to learn how to sell.
``I wrote historical novels about the ancient world,'' Cargill notes, ``and I got real frustrated trying to get them published. I thought you simply wrote what you liked to read, and then somebody automatically bought it. Wrong.
``You have to target a market.''
In 1991 a small press, Cheops Books of Charlottesville, printed her first-person novel about teenaged Helen of Troy, To Follow the Goddess. Kirkus, the influential review service, pronounced it a ``spirited page-turner'' and ``a delightful read.'' One savvy agent who saw the review advised Cargill to stop scribbling about monsters in the ancient world and start writing about them in our own era.
Enter such up-to-date specters as the phantom surfer - and lucrative mainstream publishers like Scholastic Inc. of New York, Toronto, London, Auckland and Sydney.
``Now I don't research the material so much as the location,'' says Cargill, who travels about the country with her family in a van each summer, seeking out likely settings for saleable stories.
Next year HarperCollins will publish Hang Loose, concerning a spooky lighthouse on St. Simon's Island off the Georgia coast; already in the works is another Scholastic entry, Pool Party, featuring criminal activity around a north Florida haunted house.
``And they only take several months each to write,'' adds Cargill, ``as opposed to two or three years for a historical novel. They keep me entertained when I'm writing them. I never quite know how they're going to end.
``It pops into my head as I'm going along.''
Fun to write and fun to read. Surf's up, and so are her spirits. Scholarly Linda Cargill has broken into popular print with a splash.
Bill Ruehlmann, The Virginian-Pilot
Linda Cargill raises the dead, and her 11-year-old son Kenny loves it. She's the local mind behind the spooky genre books some of us read as pre-teens - books with titles like The Girl in the Mirror or Blood Red Roses. The logical step after Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, the young adult genre books were camp-fire ghost stories in book form, the ones that made our adolescent skin pucker in goosebumps. Sometimes, after a couple of week's anticipation, the teacher would pull these from the box of books ordered through Scholastic, and we'd gaze at the glossy cover in excitement. It was Scholastic that published Cargill's The Surfer.
It's been a long time coming. After a six-week stint teaching at Fluvanna High School, Cargill had written a full 10 years before she got published, toiling away at her home office. Back then, Cargill wasn't in the boogey biz; she was writing historical novels for adults. "I was always always following information in places like Writers Digest Magazine - you know 'write what you like to read,'" she says. She spent two years penning To Follow the Goddess, a historical novel about the Trojan War from Helen's vantage point. Then she spent another five years sending the manuscript to New York City (the U.S. capital of publishing houses) before finding a publisher in 1991 right here at home: the local Cheops Books. [Cheops has since folded.] While far from a commercial blockbuster, the book garnered one very important review - that of Kirkus Reviews. The respected journal (oft used by libraries to determine which tomes to buy) declared To Follow the Goddess a "spirited page-turner" and "a delightful read" that "bubbl[ed] until the last huzzah."
Cargill not only credits that review with "every sale of the Goddess novel," but says it led her to the spooky tales she now weaves. An editor read the review and suggested, with Cargill's flair for suspense, she might try her pen at young adult suspense thrillers - a more lucrative writing avenue. Cargill had never even read an adult suspense thriller.
But she studied the genre and it paid off, Scholastic picked up The Surfer, Cargill's first young adult release in the U.S. [Cora Verlag published a German edition of Cargill's earlier The Witch of Pungo. It was never released here.] She says comparing the young adult books with adult historical novels is like comparing apples and oranges. History was her "original love," she says; she studied classical and near-Eastern archeology and ancient art at her two years at Bryn Mawr. "You might say it's my scholarly pre-occupation," she says. Of young adult books, "They're fun, light. They entertain me, and my son [11-year old Kenny] likes them." You can still see Cargill's love for ancient history in The Surfer; her own Lady Ingrid has echoes of The Odyssey's Circe, a goddess who turned men into animals - quite literally. Kenny, meanwhile, serves as her "special consultant."
Cargill finds the best of the genre - the cream of the creepy -- to be the books that focus on the just plain spooky. She's disturbed by the lurid violence given to her fellow Y.A. Writers, like Christopher Pike. "[His books] are more violent, more bloody - updated, maybe not for the better. He even tries to introduce sex - just in terms of the genre." The Surfer, for example, has one chaste kiss. Cargill's own work hearkens back to the grandma of the genre, Lois Duncan, who could raise my ponytail with just a ghostly whisper, not a bloody corpse.
Now to sate the pre-teen in all of us: does Cargill believe in ghosts? "I don't disbelieve in them," she says carefully. "There are certain things that seem more real than others."
For example: Cargill tells the story of an incident that happened to her own mother. Her mom woke up in the middle of the night with the feeling that something was wrong. Her throat burned inexplicably. When she awoke the next morning, she discovered her next-door neighbor had committed suicide ... by swallowing bleach.
And while Cargill seemed unfazed at the goosebumps that the bleach story induced in this writer, she did say, "it's easy to spook yourself out [writing these books]. You look over your shoulder when you're alone ... I've started locking my basement at night."
With The Surfer's release, Cargill is now riding the crest of Y.A. Publishdom. Next year will bring the release of two more of her young adult suspense thrillers, Pool Party (through Scholastic) and Hang Loose (through Harper Collins).
She researched the two in her customary style, combining research with family vacations. For Hang Loose and Pool Party, the Cargill family travelled to St. Simon's Island in Georgia. "It's a spooky place, with a haunted lighthouse ... [The Island is] filled with oak trees covered in Spanish moss," she says. The haunted lighthouse would become a key element in Hang Loose; Cargill drew on and embellished local legends about the lighthouse and the ghost of the pipe-smoking keeper. Did she visit the haunted tower? "No, but my husband did .. .I was too much of a coward," she says. And, no, it wasn't the phantom which kept Cargill away - she's afraid of heights.
She's hoping to write an adult suspense thriller next. She's still "shopping for ideas." The Cargill family may have to go on sabbatical again.
Jennifer Niesslein, C-Ville Weekly.