by Kari Jones
Orca Book Publishers, 2012
ISBN 978-1-4598-0096-0
$9.95, 111 pp, ages 10 – 14
orcabook.com
Out of Season is a new title in the high/low Orca Currents series. These books are short novels written around contemporary themes for upper intermediate or secondary students who are reading below grade level. Out of Season is written at a Grade 2 – 3 level. Maya is a fourteen-year-old girl who secretly paddles her kayak to Riley Bay to check on a family of sea otters that she has sighted there. Each day she worries that she will be discovered by her family and be told to stop. There are poachers in the area and they have proved to be dangerous. Eventually, Maya is involved in a race to save the otters as well as her Dad’s job as a fisherman.
Classroom Connections: This book could be used to focus on a number of reading comprehension strategies particularly predicting, questioning and inferring. If you are looking for ocean themed books to support a science unit, to celebrate Oceans Day, or even for literature circles, Out of Season would certainly make that theme accessible to the struggling reader.
Review by Brenda Boreham.
This review is from Canadian Teacher Magazine’s Mar/Apr 2013 issue.