The girl of the Sea of Cortez - Peter Benchley (First edition)

Peter Benchley, author of Jaws, The Deep, and The Island, has had the daring to make a completely new departure. He has moved at a stroke into the ranks of the fabulist-novelist, and has done so with triumphant success.

Paloma, the fourteen-year-old girl of the title, is an enchanting creation, almost a sea-nymph for all her convincing flesh and blood. Fearless and curious, she absorbs the knowledge of the sea and its inhabitants handed down to her by her fisherman father, and adventures into the mute beauties and mysteries of the underwater world. But no one else on her island shares Paloma's attitude. To the others sea creatures are food to eat, in which some are good to eat, in which case you kill them for the pot or to sell, and some are dangerous, in which case you just kill them. Because Paloma's adored father used to make his living from the sea, his legacy to her is not a lucrative one. It is destructive ignorance, not necessary use of nature, that she abhors.

And it is destructive ignorance that comes to threaten Paloma's beloved secret place, an underwater garden of Eden which she discovered by chance and which she explores almost every day. This is the story of how she finds the courage and skill to defy the threat, and manages to fight it off.

On the back of the jacket you will see an underwater photograph of Peter Benchley riding a giant manta ray. It is not there merely for its own astonishing sake, but because at the climax of Paloma’s story a manta ray plays a crucial part. It seems almost like a thrilling passage in a fairy-tale — but Peter Benchley the marine naturalist is as forceful a presence in this novel as Peter Benchley the famous story-teller: his compelling fable of Man and Nature is anchored in the truth of his own experience.