Kate Allen was 19 years old and living in a small town on the Massachusetts coast when a fisherman brought in a great white shark.

“That shark blew my mind,” Allen recalled. “I’d just been swimming in the ocean the previous night, and my parents always said the water was too cold for sharks. I watched the shark being dissected on the dock. That memory stuck with me. It was strange and new.”

Years later, Allen was taking a novel-writing class taught by mystery writer David Housewright at the Loft in Minneapolis. By that time, great whites were making national news as they migrated off the coast of Cape Cod, following the exploding seal population. Seals are these sharks’ favorite food.

When Housewright asked Allen’s class to begin writing a novel, Kate was inspired by her shark encounter and the great whites’ behavior to write “The Line Tender.”

Twelve-year-old Lucy’s dad is a rescue diver and both of them are missing Lucy’s mom, a shark expert who drowned five years earlier. Lucy’s a talented artist doing a summer science project with her best friend, Fred. When Sookie, a fisherman and family friend, brings in a great white, Lucy draws the big fish while it is dangling from a hoist:

“I drew the strange arc of the shark’s body in a single line like a big nose on the page, just for shape. I added the bands around the body and drew in the ropes that connected the shark to the winch, drawing the basic structure of the contorted shark to show how it was possible for something so large to be suspended in midair.”

Lucy can hardly bear more sadness when there is another death, and she realizes she must metaphorically become a line tender who links her loved ones. (A line tender is the person who holds the line that attaches to divers who are often working in murky water. It’s the line tender’s job to guide the deep diver.) When Lucy finds her mother’s paperwork for a grant to study the sharks, she contacts people who knew her mom and begins to understand her love of biology. She’s helped by Sookie and a kind older neighbor, Mr. Patterson.

When Allen began her novel, Housewright told her that even though she was writing fiction, she had to do research as though it was real. So she tracked down the fisherman who brought in that real great white when she was a teenager, as well as the biologist who dissected it, and interviewed them a number of times. “When I didn’t know something I found an expert,” she says.

Allen’s debut novel is, indeed, tender. Also funny, poignant, sad and filled with hope. It’s not surprising that it earned six starred reviews from the major national journals.

Allen seems low-key about this remarkable reception, except to say, “It’s pretty amazing.” Unlike authors who give their full biographies online, Allen’s home page offers only two sentences. “I guess I do keep a pretty quiet presence,” she admitted.

Growing up in a small Massachusetts town, Allen loved to draw and write. While she was attending Bates College in Maine, she met her future husband, Jon Schultz, who works in marketing at St. Catherine University in St. Paul. Their sons are Sam, 14, and 12-year-old Leo. After living a few years in Chicago, the couple moved to the Twin Cities to be closer to grandparents Dan and Barbara Schultz, who live in Golden Valley.

“I had wanted to write a book for the longest time,” Allen recalled. “After I graduated from Bates, I had a hard time getting a writing practice going. I doodled in a journal but didn’t have any ideas. I knew I wanted to write about a girl in that coming-of-age window — 12, 13, 14 — but I didn’t really know Lucy yet. The first things I thought were that she was pretty outspoken, she acts with her heart, moves with agency, does what she needs to do.”

One of the most appealing characters in the novel is Mr. Patterson, who sits on his front porch listening to baseball games and is always on Lucy’s side.

“I love Mr. Patterson, too,” Allen says. “He’s a composite of a number of older people I’ve known. Like Lucy, I grew up having older neighbors who were like family. If I forgot my violin at school, I’d call Louise, my neighbor across the street, and she’d bring it. We’d sit on the porch and talk. I love the idea of older people guiding younger people. So much comes from experience in life. Young people need guidance and sometimes (that works) when you skip a generation for the grandparent role.”

Allen, who was a teacher, acknowledges it “took me forever” to finish writing the book because she had little kids and she worked at educational publisher Math Teachers Press in St. Louis Park. She is currently senior proposal writer for Thomson Reuters in Eagan.

Now that “The Line Tender” is published, will Allen have a hard time letting her characters go?

“Oh definitely,” she says. “Lucy and Fred seem like my children. I dream about them sometimes. It will be hard to leave them.”

Here is what Allen hopes young readers take away from her book: “Difficult things are going to happen in life. Hard, hard times are inevitable. The power of the story is that we can adjust, adapt, find a way to move forward.”

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