Book Report for Sea by Heidi Kling
BFF Charm: Yay
Swoonworthy Scale: 7
Talky Talk: Right On
Bonus Factors: Indonesia, Mysterious Loner Dude, Diversity
Relationship Status: Summer Love
The Deal:
Sienna (Sea) Jones lost her mother in a plane crash over 3 years ago. She tries to act like she’s fine, but she has actually stopped living. She doesn’t go into the ocean anymore, and she certainly doesn’t surf with her best friend/crush Spider anymore. In fact, their friendship is pretty nonexistent nowadays. So when her big surprise-birthday-present from her dad is a trip to Indonesia– to work with him and his team to help kids orphaned after the tsunami suffering from PTSD– she is less than thrilled. In fact, she flat-out refuses to go. Her dad knows she won’t go on a plane after what happened! What was he thinking?! However, a rare visit from Spider sparks something in Sienna, and she decides to make the trip.
Once they arrived at the pesantren in Yogyakarta, Sea struggles to deal with the living conditions, is broken-hearted (and comforted) by the orphans from Aceh, and is drawn to a very mysterious boy there. As her feelings for Deni grow, and Sea starts following her heart and breaking rules like only an American teen can, she also realizes that this trip may have been as much for her as for the other orphans.
BFF Charm: Yay
Sienna is a good girl. To be honest, I’d kind of like to be her big sister, or maybe her aunt. She is sometimes rash, the way teenagers can be, and that got on my nerves, as an adult, but not so much so that I hated her. She also grew as the story progressed– I’m not talking leaps and bounds, because that would have been unrealistic, but in small ways, still maintaining her teen self.
Swoonworthy Scale: 7
This book is fairly chaste, but Kling does a fantastic job of building romantic tension. I immediately liked Spider (despite his wretched nickname), so I wasn’t so sure I wanted Sea to like the Indonesian boy I knew she was going to fall for. But then Kling introduced Deni, and oh boy, she made him so hot! I mean, literally, that boy is a sizzler. And the chemistry between the two of them was perfect. If you’ve ever gone on vacay and met that super-gorgeous boy, and just let yourself fall head-over-heels, even though you know it’s only going to be for the week that you’re there, you’ll know how reading this book felt.
Talky Talk: Right On
Okay, there was one thing that I thought was really going to bug me. When I first started reading ‘Sea’, her dad at one point mentions PTSD, and then goes on to spell out for us what the acronym stands for. I immediately thought NO!!! Don’t be THAT book!!!!!! However, I kept reading, and it really WASN’T that book. I didn’t particularly like that all of the Indonesian or Acehnese words were in italics, only because I didn’t feel it was necessary. It was obvious they weren’t English words (Although, who knows, I did read an ARC, so this might have been corrected later). I have to give props to Kling for her dealing with the language translation, though. I mean, it’s not like Deni was speaking Spanish, and we could have figured out what he was saying without any help. Indonesian is completely different, plus Kling didn’t over-translate (In fact, I don’t think she ever actually said what a pesantren was. And I won’t either. You’ll def. have an idea, but I recommend looking it up anyway!). She kept it conversational, and because she did, I found it believable.
Kling’s voice for Sienna felt so accurate, that I didn’t even really mind when I was annoyed with her for being such a teenager, and I loved Sienna’s opinions of the adults around her. The author painted a vivid picture of life through a 15-year old’s eyes. I loved watching Sea come to realizations about herself while living this adventure, because although this book dealt with some heavy topics, it was also incredibly personal, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. There WERE a couple of plot points that didn’t quite make sense to me, (but that could have been intentional, as told by a 15-year old.) and they were niggling compared to the overall story.
Howevs, if I had ever done what Sea did near the end of the trip, my parents would have Ended. My. Life. Seriously.
Bonus Factor: Indonesia
I honestly don’t know much about Indonesia, apart from what a friend of mine from there told me, so it was nice to get a view into some of the culture. Yay culture!
Bonus Factor: Mysterious Loner Dude
Okay, so Deni is, quite possibly, my favorite loner dude, evs. It didn’t hurt that he kind of reminded me of this 18-year old Peruvian named Fernando I met when I was 16. Oh, Fernando, you were so cute, and we tried so hard to have conversations, and then we wrote letters, and I was SO sure you were going to whisk me away to your country… and I’m so glad my teenaged mind changed and I stopped writing to you. Sorry. Anyway, what was I saying? Deni, yes! When Sienna meets him, she is so overwhelmed by the exotic and terrifying beauty of the country, and then she sees this super-intense -looking cutie… le sigh.
Bonus Factor: Diversity
Yay for taking an American teenager out of America! I have to say, Sienna did a pretty excellent job acclimating to the living conditions at the pesantren, without too much complaint. That was refreshing. AND hooray for dif. races gettin’ together without their race being mentioned! Sienna travelled to Indonesia. There she met a cute boy. The end.
Casting Call:
Bridgit Mendler as Sea
I pictured Sea as a kind of typical American teen. Disney offered me this one. I like her.
Darius Sinathrya as Deni
Do you know how hard it is to find Indonesian actors? Ahem, Hollywood? Anyway, after many failed attempts, an online offer to ‘make Indonesian baby’, and some questionable sites with pictures of young Indonesian ‘actors’, I found this guy.
Relationship Status: Summer Love
This book and I fell SO in love over summer vacation. It was something I totally wasn’t expecting, because I thought it would be too Disney for me, and it was a little worried about my love for fantasy. But when we started hanging out, and then with the obsessive making out that followed? None of that mattered. I mean, I know we’ll probably never see each other again, since we don’t even live in the same state, but that’s okay. There was a moment right before we left in time for school when the book started talking about coming to visit me once it got its driver’s license, but I know there’s no way its parents would be okay with that. Still, it will always have a special place in my heart.
FTC Full Disclosure: My review copy was a free ARC I received from Penguin. I received neither money nor cocktails for writing this review (dammit!). Sea is now available.
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Indonesia! A place I want to visit! (If I can work out the toilet situation.)
Also it’s good to read that there’s none of that “ti amo. i love you.” bullshit.
top things i found impressive about “sea” via this review, in order of wow:
1. a character named spider managed to actually be not lame.
2. the author resisted the urge to over-translate (THANK YOU).
3. the sacrifice of jenny’s internet purity to discover a REAL indonesian actor.
I wish I could unsee some of the things I’ve seen, Posh.
oooh i like a good multi-cultural book that doesn’t feel the need to slap you around the face with it. shall go and check the UK availability, and if none yet persuade boyfriend to pick it up on his “work” trip that seems to involve him driving a convertible through the wine region of california… but i’m excited to read based on the review. i love when authors just let teenagers be teenagers, annoying or not. kudos heidi kling.
lorna, that sounds like the best “work trip” ever! I want to work where your boyfriend does! sign me up for the cali wine region tour!! you should see if you hide in his luggage and sneak onboard the plane
lorna, your boyfriend’s “work” trip sounds suspiciously like the “work” that Guy Fieri, the host of Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, does. I hate Guy Fieri; he is my nemesis*. Partially because he’s visually offensive (bleached blond spiked hair, goatee, backwards sunglasses, Ed Hardy tshirts) and partly because no one seems to want to let me drive around America in a classic convertible eating my weight in burgers, which is, like, MY DREAM JOB.
*unless your boyfriend is guy fieri, in which case I take back what I said about hating him.
ha, he’s a medical physicist, so spends 90% of the year in a dark, dingy basement lab. the other 10% he gets to go and teach at universities across the world. i normally get to come for super cheap but i have to work this time
On the plus side he feels bad about going without me, so my YA wish list shall come back fully stocked- suggestions please for anything a bit unusual?
why ask for the unusual when you can get the USUAL, i.e. WINE FROM NAPA?!!
Um, hello, Lorna, WHO does your boyfriend work for? Also, GET this book!!!!
I want to live in this post. Or more specifically in the Mysterious Loner Dude paragraph. :0)
heidi, i’ll need to watch the matrix a few times before i can figure out how to get you *IN* the post (or maybe i’ll take a shortcut and watch zoolander) but you are ALWAYS welcome on our site, i.e. the neverending slumber party of awesome.
Yay! Heidi you are welcome in our paragraphs anytime.
DUDES!! This book sounds super interesting! I lived in Singapore for 5 years when I was in high school, so I visited Indonesia many times. And seriously, South East Asia is awsome and I am totally psyched to read a book that’s set there.
Will definitely read this one.
Plus I was in India when the tsunami hit, and it was just so weird being there amidst all the destruction and the reports of the rapidly climbing death toll. Very sad. So I’m glad to see that someone is still writing about it, y’know? Sometimes it seems like the rest of the world forgets about a major crisis (like the tsunami) a few months after it happens. Not that I’m critisizing ppl — I am just as guilty of forgetting about things if they don’t affect me personally. But anyway, from what I saw of the coastlines that were just totally decimated, it’ll take years and years for it to get back to “normal” (if that’s even possible). So yeah, I agree with the “yay for taking a teenager out of America!”
Sounds fabulous…the only thing I HATE about Summer fling-type books, is that they remind me of how I need to have a fling this summer. Otherwise, I’ve wasted my entire life so far and I might as well just curl up into a ball and watch Hannah Montana or something.
But even Hannah’s gettin’ some. This does not work for me.
But I now HAVE to know what she does at the end – does she burn down something? Isn’t that what us teens do when the angst because too much? That sounds dramatic – I do hope so!!
Just you wait and see, Holly…
jenny, this book sounds amazing! i love the not-over-translated part — that drives me CUH-razy (and major props to ms. kling for resisting the urge since indonesian isn’t a super-common second language in these parts). and i love yr casting call — who are these actors, and where can i see them? it’s so nice to see new faces (and i’m the worst offender of all of us with the same-old-same-old casting call choices).
You know, I really love George, but after this post, I’m MAYBE kinda sorta Team Fernando now. Sorry, George!