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    The Watcher
    The Watcher
    The Watcher
    Ebook111 pages1 hour

    The Watcher

    By James Howe

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A mysterious girl, dubbed The Watcher, spins tales of rescue from her lonely perch above the beach. She closely observes the actions of two people she has never met: a fourteen-year-old boy whose family seems perfect and a handsome eighteen-year-old lifeguard. Their lives become intertwined -- and their troubling truths are revealed.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAtheneum Books for Young Readers
    Release dateJan 24, 2012
    ISBN9781439115787
    The Watcher
    Author

    James Howe

    James Howe is the author of more than ninety books for young readers. Bunnicula, coauthored by his late wife Deborah and published in 1979, is considered a modern classic of children’s literature. The author has written six highly popular sequels, along with the spinoff series Tales from the House of Bunnicula and Bunnicula and Friends. Among his other books are picture books such as Horace and Morris but Mostly Dolores and beginning reader series that include the Pinky and Rex and Houndsley and Catina books. He has also written for older readers. The Misfits, published in 2001, inspired the nationwide antibullying initiative No Name-Calling Week, as well as three sequels, Totally Joe, Addie on the Inside, and Also Known as Elvis. A common theme in James Howe’s books from preschool through teens is the acceptance of difference and being true to oneself. Visit him online at JamesHowe.com.

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    Reviews for The Watcher

    3.5/5

    66 ratings6 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I actually liked this book and its not something I would regularly like. It reminds me of a Ellen Hopkins book, touching intense topics and writing them in prose. The book leaves you guessing but half way through the book, I guessed the ending, which is a favorable hobby of mine. Though, it makes the rest of the book draining. The topic touched, parent abuse, is a great topic for students to be able to read. This book was great in terms, a couple of children saw something wrong and decided to do something about it. I would keep this in a high school library.
    • 3/5
      The Watcher may be one of the thinnest books on my bookshelf, but it's one of the deepest at the same time. You'll race through it, but the end lingers with you for quite awhile. As sad as the ending is, there's something satisfying about how all the character arcs in the story wrap up.
    • 5/5
      Excellent young adult book. It is moving and thoughtful in a rather intense way, touching on several different relevant issues through the eyes of three protagonists centered around one girl. It is about family and growing up and connecting and is all-around appealing.
    • 2/5
      A little slow at first and a bit too young for me to relate to, but an OK read. Quick, yet sad to say not very impressive.
      5/10
    • 3/5
      This one was not my cup of tea. I didn't like the ending. I kept waiting for the author to flesh out the character of the watcher, and he did, at the last second, which was very disappointing. I like the Bunnicula books but this one was just okay.
    • 5/5
      Margaret goes to the beach everyday with her notebook and writes herself into the life of what she sees as a perfect family. At the same time, the children in that “perfect” family are worried that their parents are going to divorce. The lifeguard, who Margaret sees as an angel who might be her salvation is very concerned about how his family is coping with the death of his brother. In the mean time, Margaret goes home each day to a father who physically abuses her. In the end, Chris and Evan are her salvation. This book is appropriate for middle school readers and above.

    Book preview

    The Watcher - James Howe

    a house full of strangers

    The bitter taste of lead brought her to her senses. How long had she been sitting there, lost in thought? She lowered the pencil, tucked it into the small notebook on her lap, and in its place drew in an oily strand of hair, which she sucked and nibbled like a hungry little mouse.

    It was the first day. Miraculously, they had allowed her to go out by herself, and she had almost at once found this safe place, this spot at the top of the stairs where she could sit and watch the others on the beach. It was early yet, and a weekday, so the beach was nearly empty.

    She was glad for that. It made it easier to believe she was invisible when there were fewer eyes to see her. What would they have seen, anyway? A bony girl with loose brown hair falling across her face and shoulders. A baggy T-shirt and pink and powder-blue flip-flops, one of which was held together with packing tape. That’s all. Just her body, just her clothes. They would not have seen her. No.

    Her parents had never rented a house at the beach before. The fact that they had done so for an entire month filled her with feelings so unfamiliar she had no names for them. Still, it was good to be filled with something, even feelings without names. It was, she imagined, a little like having a birthday party—something she had never actually had—and all the guests being strangers. A house full of strangers, but a full house.

    It did not occur to her to sit on the beach. She hadn’t brought a towel to sit on, for one thing. She wasn’t even wearing a bathing suit under her T-shirt, just shorts. It didn’t matter. She was content to be where she was, slightly above, at a little distance from, the people and the sand and the sea that stretched out forever. From where she sat she could watch the children on their pudgy legs run to the water’s edge and fill their buckets, then scamper back to the safety of their mothers, shrieking and laughing as the waves rolled up behind them, nipping at their heels: tag, you’re it. She could almost smell the lotion the mothers squeezed out of tubes into the palms of their hands and rubbed lovingly over their little sons’ and daughters’ browning bellies and fiery backs. She could watch umbrellas pop open like bright flowers bursting into bloom, and these made her think of the clusters of crocuses that appeared in her backyard each spring, always catching her by surprise, bringing with them as they did the memory of hope.

    But what she watched most intently were the families—not pieces of families with only a mother or a nanny, but what she thought of as complete families with two parents and at least two children, preferably a girl and a boy.

    There was only one such family on the beach that morning, and she found it not only complete but nearly perfect. It was the little girl who had caught her eye, but it was the girl’s brother who held it. He appeared to be about thirteen, her age, although he might have been a little older. He was a good deal older than his sister, that much was clear. He had a long, thin body, the kind she had once read described as lanky. It wasn’t his body that interested her, though, but his manner—the way, for instance, he dug a long trough in the sand for his sister to sit in, then knelt before her, listening patiently to all her instructions before beginning the elaborate sand fin that would turn her into a mermaid. It seemed, as far as she could tell from where she sat, that the boy had real artistic talent. She wondered if his father was an artist, because she noticed that he sat sketching his children as they played together.

    She expected the boy to run off at some point, to join friends and leave his sister behind. But he never did. He seemed to enjoy being with her, and when he took her hand at one point, it was such a natural gesture that she felt certain he’d done it many times before. And when, later in the day, after she had been watching the family for a long time, she saw the boy bend down and kiss, actually kiss, the top of his sister’s head, she became so dizzy she was forced to drop her head to her knees and think of other things until the dizziness went away.

    She turned her attention to the others on the beach. It was getting late. People were packing up and leaving. The only new arrivals were some boys carrying surfboards. She cringed when they charged down the steps past her; she found their buzz-saw voices and masculine posturing repulsive.

    It was then that she realized how much she’d been watching someone else that day, someone other than the family. Mostly she had watched the back of his shoulders and neck and head, all golden and bronze, because that was all she could see when he was sitting, which he was most of the day. But from time to time he had stood up, to blow his whistle or wave his arms or stretch. And on occasion he had jumped down to run into the water and pull out a floundering swimmer or go for a swim himself; those were the times she liked watching him most.

    When he walked past her to leave or return to the beach, he did not speak to her or acknowledge her in any way. Which of course made sense because he could not see her. She was invisible.

    But she saw him, and though she did not understand it—how different could he be, after all, from those rowdy boys with their surfboards; a little older, perhaps, but cut from the same mold—she thought him beautiful. More beautiful than anyone she had ever seen.

    If it had happened somewhere else, she might have found this unlikely response of hers more disturbing than exciting, but here—in this magical place that was so like the crocuses in spring—it was just the opposite. Here, she thought, here she could live in a house full of strangers and feel at home.

    •

    How could the girl have known there was an angel?

    She had always been a prisoner. She had seen nothing of the island but what the beast had allowed her to see.

    Then one day while the enchanted doll sang her sad song a key fell from her pocket. The girl quickly grabbed it up before the doll could notice.

    For when the doll was under the spell of the music she saw and heard nothing. And so the girl was able to unlock the door and slip away. The beast was sleeping in the shade of a tree. He was in a stupor. All around him were the bones of his last meal. The girl shivered. The beast ate animals without killing them first.

    Scarcely daring to breathe, the girl tiptoed past the beast until she reached the gate and was free.

    In the distance, she could hear the steady roar of the ocean. She ran along strange paths, past wild blueberry bushes and tall reeds whispering reeds

    wild blueberries and whispering reeds

    until she came to the dunes and then she ran across those and at last she came to the ocean.

    Her heart was happy and sad at the same time.

    Happy because the ocean went on forever and promised freedom.

    Sad because the ocean surrounded her little island and meant prison.

    The girl began to cry.

    Then she heard the fluttering of wings.

    And there,

    There, standing atop a wooden tower at the ocean’s edge, she beheld an angel folding his cloud-white wings close against his golden body.

    He was gazing out at the ocean, his head held high and proud. He did not see the girl.

    Where had he come from? Why was he there?

    Perhaps the girl had prayed without knowing, and the angel

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