The Wooden Nickel

"Lucky Lunt is an endangered species: a third-generation lobsterman who works the same waters as his father and grandfather, and pilots one of the few remaining wooden boats in the fleet. He knows every truck and trawler in town by the sound of its engine, only buys American, and nurses a hearty contempt for the rich tourists who throng to the coast every year.". "But even in Orphan Point, things are no longer what they used to be, and Lucky's beginning to feel like an outsider in his own house. His wife has become an artist, selling sea-glass sculptures to yuppies; his daughter is bound for college, which might as well be another planet; and his son, who has turned angry and lawless, is already making more money than his old man. Even Lucky's heart is failing him: he can't haul traps alone anymore. But it doesn't take a genius to see that his new deckhand, the sexy, not-quite-divorced wife of the local lobster wholesaler, looks like a whole lot of trouble.". "As if that weren't enough, Lucky finds someone else's bouys bobbing in his ancestral waters. Before he knows it, he's embroiled in a lobster war that forces him to break all the rules: family, health, business, even the rules of the sea. As waves of bad luck turn into a flood tide, Lucky enters an epic confrontation with his enemies and a rogue whale - a battle his unreliable heart may not survive."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.