- Named a Top Five Debut Novel of 2009 by The Globe & Mail!

-Listed in the Quill & Quire’s Best Books of 2009 edition!

- included in the National Post’s Best Books of the Year list!

- Shortlisted for the prestigious Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Canada and Caribbean region)!

- Features the best precocial kid narrator of all time?

Amphibian has been out a year today: if you haven’t read it yet I sort of feel bad for you, or is it jealous of you? In any case, if you’ve missed out, Amphibian it is a perfect spring read: it is a sit and read in one sitting kind of book. Like many, I was a fan of the precocial-kid narrators in many huge books like Franky McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes but I am going to go right ahead and say that Carla Gunn’s lead role, Phin Walsh, is my favourite precocial child narrator of all time.

Phin Walsh is an ahead-of-his-years-and-peers Green Channel addict: a deeper thinker than his psychiatrist, with more fluid intelligence than his teacher (and “Prime Enemy Number One”) Mrs. Wardman. He’ll also vent at you in Gaelic if you cross him, and get away with it, because how many other kids and teachers speak it? He has a logical and rational contradiction to everything he is told in school, or at home, or by the psychiatrist thrust on him. His class had a guest speaker one day, who got them to put their thumbprints all over everything and told them they should feel good about themselves because no two thumbprints are the same, and that makes you special. Phin says, “I don’t know how that made us special, but I didn’t say anything. No two worms have exactly the same skin pattern, and nobody thinks they’re special.”

When Mrs. Wardman reveals the new class pet, a White’s tree frog, her and the rest of the class are ecstatic. But Phin rightfully sits there baffled, wondering what kind of fool buys a nocturnal class pet that will be asleep all day in class, and how could she possibly not have thought of that? (He also makes it his duty to save that frog and get it back to Australia.) When Mrs. Wardman gives the class a spelling test that asks, “Lions live in the J—–,” he calls her over to his desk and asks her if it was a trick question, since lions live in the Savannah and “there’s no J word for Savannah.” He’s told to just write jungle.

He knows all this because he is obsessed by and in love with the natural world, and very much consumed by the growing number of the world’s endangered species and the general state of the environment. To the point his mother — a well-wrought character herself — feels compelled to send him to a psychiatrist about his sleep-depriving eco-anxiety. The first thing his psychiatrist advises, is that his mother cut the Green Channel on him. (a symbolic statement, really: that’s how we adults deal with the environmental crisis.  Look away, ignore it, metaphorically change the channel.) His retort: “The Green Channel isn’t what’s making me worried! The extinction of animals is what’s making me worried!”

Gunn’s writing is both true to the way a precocial nine-year-old would see and speak of the world, but there is a fresh and assured diction in Amphibian that is a pleasure to read. There is a distinctive quality to the writing. Gunn’s effective use of constant humour has her readers laughing along, but this constant wit also spares the book any preachy or maudlin moments, and makes it accessible to those not so environmentally conscious as Phin. And it’s not all fun and wit and a message of environmental consciousness. The novel has its sad angles, like his parents’ seperation, the death of a family member, but Gunn scales mentions of these back to stray single sentences that jab you in your softspots when you aren’t looking. There is a calculated style and structure here, and that is the cause of all this book’s tremendous success.

Amphibian is in every way a success and pleasure to read: it is funny, well-written, features a fantastic memorable cast of characters, and a message that you aren’t beaten over the head with, and yet get totally struck by. It is hard to be entertaining, informative, topical, funny, and sad all in the same book. Gunn does it.

(Perk: In a non-obtrusive way: the book also enlightens you and enriches your knowledge of the natural world with a lot of tidbits, like why the spotted hyena is one of very few species in which the female is bigger than the male (she has to be able to stop him from eating her pups).