The Line Tender

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses the death of a parent and the death of a child.

Lucy, the protagonist and narrator of The Line Tender, is a 12-year-old girl with red hair and freckles who lives with her father in the coastal town of Rockport, Massachusetts. At the start of the novel, Lucy considers herself an arts person as opposed to a science person like her best friend, Fred, or her mother, Helen, who passed away five years before. When a great white shark, the focus of her mother’s research, is caught by Sookie, Lucy’s unprocessed grief over her mother’s death bubbles up to the surface. Lucy, with Fred’s help, starts learning more about her mother’s research on sharks. Lucy and Fred’s relationship takes a romantic turn, but right after, Fred dies in a quarry swimming accident. This second wave of grief pushes Lucy even deeper into shark research as a way to stay close to Fred and her mother. Ultimately, Lucy embraces community as she processes her grief and learns that she has the resilience to survive these tragedies. At the end of the novel, Lucy’s father characterizes her as a person who is “sensitive to the details” and tells her that she carries her mother’s and Fred’s memories with her (347).