Loyalty Island, WA, is a fishing community made economically viable by generations of the wealthy Gaunt family. When patriarch John Gaunt dies and his mercurial son, Richard, threatens to sell the fishing industry to the Japanese, the residents are afraid of losing their livelihood. The story is told from the perspective of teenaged Cal, whose father is gone fishing most of the year in Alaska and whose cultured and restless mother secludes herself in her basement studio listening to her extensive record collection. When Cal's mother decides to spend the fishing season in her hometown in California, Cal refuses to accompany her and is left with a schoolmate's family. Feeling abandoned, Cal makes routine visits to his house and discovers a secret that haunts him for the rest of his life. VERDICT In his debut novel, Dybek writes expertly about fishery and music, an odd juxtaposition that nevertheless gives the story a deep, otherworldly quality. A main theme is the question of what sins we are capable of when pushed to our limits. A captivating, literary coming-of-age novel. [See Prepub Alert, 9/30/11.]-Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

*Starred Review* As a Loyalty Island boy and the son of a crab-boat captain, it's no surprise that Cal falls under the spell of Treasure Island. What is remarkable is how Cal's gruff father makes up auxiliary stories about Robert Louis Stevenson's Captain Flint and how deftly first-time novelist Dybek riffs on the predicaments facing the pirate classic's young Jim Hawkins to add ballast to his incandescently imaginative and suspenseful tale of fathers and sons, treasure and desperation, secrets and betrayals. Unfurling within moody evocations of the sea-brewed weather of the Olympic Peninsula and the purgatory endured by the women and children while the men fish in Alaskan waters, Dybek's tale subtly maps the trajectories that lead from worry to anger to tragedy, beginning with Cal's parents' foundering marriage. Henry wanted nothing other than exactly what he had. Donna, a homesick Californian, submerges herself in a tide of music in her basement studio, which is both sanctuary and prison. When the fishing fleet's owner dies, the fishermen fear the worst from his volatile, feckless heir, and Cal finds himself enmeshed in a moral dilemma of epic complexity. Dybek has created a superbly orchestrated and soulful drama of loyalty to family and an imperiled way of life and the fathomless forces that make a good man go bad.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

"I've always thought that people cherish their dreams," says Cal, the 14-year-old narrator of Dybek's first novel, "because, in them, they act but rarely have to decide how to act." The same luxury isn't an option for Cal, who will have to make profound decisions before the novel ends. His father, the captain of a crab boat in coastal Washington, spends much of the year in Alaska with the rest of the town's men, and Dybek writes gracefully about those left behind: "It seemed that the absence was ours somehow, not theirs, that we were the ones who were gone." When the owner of the fishing fleet upon which the small community depends for its livelihood dies, his son inherits the company and threatens to send its operations to Japan. Dybek brings serious talent to bear in depicting both the larger tableau and smaller set pieces, including a flashback in which the town's roughest resident goes on a disastrous boyhood hunting trip with his father. The novel loses its footing partway through, when the scope narrows and the dialogue grows stilted, but it finishes on a powerful note of moral murkiness that suits the gloomy, damp atmosphere of the Pacific Northwest. "The kitchen windows turned the deep green of a chalkboard," Dybek writes in a characteristically evocative early passage. "The evening rain began, beading against the glass of the back door like sweat."

Make no mistake, Dybek's title is a shout-out to Treasure Island-and with good reason, since this debut combines the spirit of 19th-century boys' adventure stories with a more stationary coming-of-age yarn. Nowhere could be more stationary than Loyalty Island, a crab-fishing village located on the border between Canada and the U.S., and home to young Cal, incorrigibly imaginative son of one of the perpetually absent fathers who sail off on perilous journeys, leaving their sons to grow up in the oppressive shadow of fishing magnate John Gaunt and learn of the outside world from movies and records. When Gaunt dies, a cold war divides the generations between tradition and a love of pop culture relics. A murder conspiracy and family secrets float to the surface, but Dybek's grasp on his material is too shaky for the intrigue to have much effect. Cal's world never quite comes to life, perhaps because most of the action occurs offshore, leaving readers with an endless list of samurai movies and Dylan songs in lieu of plot and a satisfying denouement. Though there are hints of precocious brilliance, too often the novel reads as pastiche. Agent: Julie Barer, Barer Literary. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.