Grayson (ESPANOL) (Spanish Edition)

I was assigned to annotate this book for school. This book cannot be described with words; it touches you with something beyond words. This girl and this whale have, by the end of a few hours, become amazing friends. At the end of the book, I just sat there processing it. I loved it. I rated it with 5 stars for reasons of amazing diction, beautiful grammer, and overall creativity. I recommend this for ANY age at all. Everyone will want to read this over and over again by the time they finish it. One word: Beautiful.

This was such a powerful, heartwarming TRUE story about two creatures so different but so alike...a human and a whale. It exhibits emotions of love, fear, trust. It tells of hope, endurance and faith. I love whales...their beauty, sense of understanding and intelligence. I love the ocean, the vastness and so much out there that we don't know and/or understand. This book brought two worlds together...a young woman swimmer and a baby whale lost in the vast ocean from its mother. I, as a mother of two young daughters, felt a connection to this story. I have since given it as a Mother's Day gift to my own mom. It shows the love of a mother whale and its baby and a young girl who was brave enough to venture into their world to help. I keep it on my nightstand and reread when I need a little "pick me up".

Champion swimmer Lynne Cox has spent her life breaking swimming records, setting lofty athletic standards, achieving the seemingly impossible, or near-impossible time and again: swimming the English Channel, crossing the Bering Straits, etc. To know of her swimming achievements is to marvel at a career that has been spent attempting incredible goals--breaking barriers, bridging mighty gulfs and making connections that seem awe-inspiring to us mere mortals. Now these same qualities can be found in this moving, elegiac, true-life account of her brief encounter as a teenager with a motherless baby whale, Grayson. The same determination Cox has swam with is apparent in the empathy she shows for her fellow mammal swimmer and in her resolve to reunite the youngster with its lost mother. This too short tale is as moving as it is inspiring and will resonate for the reader long after the final page is turned, and the story of that day thirty years ago is one to be read over again and shared with lucky others. With Grayson, yet another gulf has been bridged by Lynne Cox, another unforgettable connection made.

I love the ocean and found this book beautiful and moving. It describes the experience of meeting a baby gray whale and then trying to help it find its mother. There is some wonderfully descriptive writing of the ocean, and facts added in that give it more meat. It also gives lots of advice and encouragement, not to give up, to follow your dreams and that anything is possible. We bought the audio book for a family vacation and my 4 year old and 7 year old both enjoyed the story very much. They are excited to attend a grunion run and are also excited about whales.

I have two daughters, one in kindergarten, one in fourth grade, and every night I read them both to sleep with a chapter from this amazing book. Not only is it well written, but it tells the story of a teenage girl who has tenacity of spirit to swim in the cold ocean every day before dawn to train for swimming long distances. In doing so the writer/swimmer tells of how she faced her fears in those cold, dark swims and how she passionately loves the ocean and all the mysteries it contains. My girls were mesmerized by her story, and while the five year old fell asleep a lot sooner than my fourth grader, none of us could ask for a better story to read together. What a great message this book gives kids; to face the unknown, to have faith in oneself, to work hard for a goal that many people couldn't imagine, and all the while respecting and caring about our environment! Cox captures details about the tiniest of creatures to, naturally, the touching story of Grayson, a lost baby whale she stuggles to help. Grayson is filled with fascinating details about marine life off the Orange County coastline, specifically, Seal Beach, and reminds us all that there is something mysterious and wonderful about how connected we are and that we bear a responsibility to honor that connection. I loved this book! All of us reading it (ages 5, 9 and 45) couldn't wait to get to the next chapter. Frankly, I think Grayson really should be included in all fourth grade lesson plans and curriculums; it's so informative about marine biology and contains such a great tale of the inner strength of young people! Read Grayson to your children! Not only will you love the story yourself, but they'll thank you for the lessons it contains later on. All children, especially girls, need more role models like Lynne Cox.

A quick read that is moving and authentic. It contributes to the body of knowledge about the potential for human-animal bonding. I have interacted with gray whales and this story is very accurate regarding their intelligence and gentle nature. A wonderful feel-good book!

I decided to read this book on my sisters recommendation. Aside from the fact that my greatest fear is floating around in the ocean and that I found most of it terrifing, Grayson is a delightful story and very entertaining. Not overwhelmingly long and a very quick read (even for someone as notoriously slow as me), I highly recommend this book to anyone who has a couple of hours to spare and wants something light and fun.

We are reading Grayson as an elementary school program called one school, one book. My 1st grader is a borderline reader who loves animals; I had hopes this book would turn her on to the worlds that reading can give you. It has done anything but. I hate to say that because swimming with a baby whale in the ocean should be amazing! We have encountered paragraph after paragragh of off descriptives and filler similes. To the point that you don't even know what you are reading about. I would not even call this a style, because it seems like exaggerated elaboration just to make the story book length. It's aweful and has become a dreaded part of our nightly homework routine. Not exactly the way you get a child reading.

While listening to this tale as an audiobook, I was surprised to be sitting at the edge of my recliner! For a very simple premise, Lynne Cox crafted a plot with a lot of excitement.

I was touched by the sense of communion between the human swimmer and the baby whale, each of them vulnerable and exposed.

The communication and intelligence of the whales in this story, plus a mega-pod of dophins, made me think of the line, "Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish!" the title of Douglas Adams' fourth book in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. (Where Wonko the scientist posits that dolphins were the actual creators of planet Earth.)

I now own Grayson in an audio format and as a hardcover book, and I consider it a treasure.

This was so unexpected. It gave me goosebumps just reading about her swimming with this baby whale and all the other ocean creatures she came across. I was holding my breath when the mother was swimming around her. What a great book, it definately stays with you.

Wonderful story of suspense, courage, compassion and transcendence about a teenager trying to rescue a young whale separated from it's pod. Great book for kids around 6th grade up, and adults. Great gift. Great short book to read and pass along.

A concise yet absorbing tale of a chance encounter between an endurance swimmer and a baby whale. Author Lynne Cox's maternal juices start flowing as she extends her time in the chilly surf to try to reunite the baby with its mother.

What connections and emotional bonds can exist between humans and other animals? How can we communicate to bridge the chasm between our species? How can man recapture the fascination with truly wild creatures in today's pre-fab world?

These questions -- and others -- provoked me as I read this simple yet compassionate story.

Grayson, by Lynne Cox is a wonderful concise book with lots to say. There are three different story threads running through it. The smaller thread is about a girl athlete with lots of will and determination, and the second is a nature story about the sea animals in southern California and the third thread is the most moving. It is an inspirational story about a girl tiring to help a young baby whale finds its mother. It is a story for all ages. I'm 38 and I loved it, bought one for my 1st edition collection, and I bought another for my younger ten-year-old sister.

What an endearing story about the ocean. As an avid SCUBA diver, I loved the idea of a baby whale following a swimmer along the coast because it lost its mother.

I loved how she describes all of the creatures that she ran into during the swim and rescue and educates us on their behaviors. Anyone who feels that the ocean can bring them positive energy will enjoy this book.

My only concern is that people will actually believe that they can encounter all of these creatures in a morning swim off the coast. It is just not possible, so don't get your hopes up.

About a third of the way through this one-sitting book, I began to think it could not possibly be true. However, as I continued to read the author's compelling style, I began to see the book as a metaphor for never giving up, for having compassion for the fellow inhabitants of this miraculous planet, and for life itself in all its forms. I highly recommend it to anyone who is struggling with the meaning of life or simply trying to get through it.

While the story of Grayson is undoubtedly interesting and atypical, it isn't much of a page turner. I found myself counting pages to see how much longer before I was done, and was quite tempted not to finish it. Cox does an exquisite job of describing the ocean and the marine life surrounding her, but she just goes on and on and on about nothing a lot of the time. All of her "I wonder...." - The things she finds herself wondering and speculating about are, at times, almost ridiculous. I was frustrated by the story mostly because of the ignorance demonstrated therein....baby whales are separated from their mothers frequently, and are reunited frequently. It's lucky for Grayson that he was too big to be "rescued" by some uneducated humans - taken home to be hand-raised and never seeing his mother again, like so many babies of smaller species. In all likelihood, Grayson's fate would have been the same with or without his human escort. The book would have been better without so much focus on "helping" the whale find his mother. Really, very little help was provided - Cox seems to have spent the morning merely swimming around with (losing, searching for, and petting) a baby whale, again quite interesting and atypical, but hardly worthy of 150 pages in a book.....I hate to give a negative review, but this was really the worst book I've read in a while. I don't recommend it.

I defy anyone to read this book without getting choked-up at least once, perhaps often--as I did. It describes what can only be described as a transcendant experience in the waters off Southern California, a place more at home for oil-rigs and container ships. But Lynne Cox found something really amazing--and touching--on one of her swims. Something that was both magical and mysterious. And well worth your time to read in this slim, but weighty, book.

Lynne Cox had an amazing and rare wildlife opportunity and experience--there's no doubt about it. Unfortunately, she either couldn't find the right words or thought using more flowery, mystical imagery would enhance her telling of her encounter. Her first-hand retelling is interesting, but it's not altogether engaging or well written. It's like her story telling is weighing down the actual experience. I'd recommend the book to others, but I'd share my copy rather than telling anyone to buy it new.

A genuinely mesmerising novel that you can read in a couple of hours.. A beautiful story of a 17 year old swimmer who encounters a baby grey whale in the ocean off California and the story that unfolds.. Delightfully written, this story catches you and fills you with wonderful images of nature. Highly recommended to anyone who loves nature, the ocean, or just an amazing real life story.

From the black, inky black, so very black ocean at the start to her misunderstanding of gray whales and sonar at the end, Grayson romps along but never quite gets there. I found myself repeatedly flipping to the author biography on the jacket flap, wondering how on earth Lynne Cox ever got published in The New Yorker...and how she could have apparently spent so much time in the ocean without learning very much about its inhabitants.

From the reviews, I was prepared to read about a singular connection between a human being and a gray whale made one lonely morning...instead I found a self-absorbed "true" story about a young woman's encounter with a young whale that wandered off course for several hours, then met up with its mother again. Despite Lynne's self-proclaimed connection with the ocean, she doesn't even realize the young whale is swimming near her until pointed out by her friend on the pier. And then suddenly she feels she is the one totally responsible for the whale, even swimming insanely out to an oil derrick offshore to stay with Grayson. Although she places herself front and center, this event involved many people, including dockside workers, lifeguard patrols, fishing boats, and even the ship Queen Mary. This comes as a slight shock to the reader, as her emphasis on the singularity of her swim with the whale initially has us believing the book is about her interaction with the whale, rather than a multi-pronged rescue effort. It would have read better as a simple narration of what happened, instead of her projections of what the whales were thinking, complete with dopey imaginings of telepathic whale-human connection.

I think there is a nice little story in here somewhere, but Lynne Cox desperately needs better editing, and would have done better to have written it as "based on a true story", which would have allowed the plethora of animal description and interaction without causing readers familiar with marine fauna to suffer from eyeroll strain.

This short novel transported me, and I read it straight through without stopping. It is a sweet and moving story that reminds us how fragile and delicate our relationship with the natural world is. I've given this book as a gift many times, and everyone I've recommended it to has enjoyed it immensely.

As with Lynne Cox's other book Swimming to Antarctica, this book is of the highest order, very inspirational and motivational, well written without any unnessecary jargon,- a must have for any person who inspire to challenge themselves, either physical or mentally.

Regards

Jan ( Australia).

A nice little story, but far too talky. The authoress goes on, and on, and on about her swimming skills, and her personal challanges, past and present. Her actual interaction with the baby whale was not the primary subject, as one had been led to believe.

I had purchased three volumes, in order to share Grayson with my grandchildren and the elementary school children whom I mentor. I am returning two of those for refund.