I hate the question: “What is your favorite book?” It is so hard to answer that question because you know that you have to say “the Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien or “Narnia” or “Pride and Prejudice” (which I do love a lot!) but those books are classics, and are on a totally different scale. And so, if I put those classics on a different scale, I would rank this book, —The Sea Snake— as my favorite book of all time!
Steven W. Meader was an author in the 50’s and 60’s. He wrote books he knew boys would love, and he wrote LOTS of them. He wrote a wide, diverse collection of stories, from pirates (The Black Buccaneer) to the war in Korea (Saber Pilot). This story, however, is about WWII Nazi Submarines.
My family runs a living books library in northeast Wisconsin. And in our library, we have two copies of the Sea Snake, and they are all always checked out. Even my personal copy has been checked out, for good reason.
This book is about a fifteen-year-old boy named Barney during WWII. Barney’s family are fishermen, but he doesn't just fish. He helps the army by sitting in a hidden bunker cut into the sand dunes near Kitty Hawk Beach, in North Carolina. His job is to notify the army of all airplane and freighter movements. He is also looking for Nazi U-Boats out to sea.
Something very interesting that you learn in this book is that the Nazi U-Boats were so close to America’s shores that you could sometimes see them from land. These beach-watchers were instated to make it possible for an army, land-based plane to take off and bomb it as soon as a U-Boat torpedoed a ship.
After one such incident, Barney, his brother, and his father, run out to a torpedoed freighter that is sinking. They find a very suspicious loaf of American bread that floated to the service, after the area was thoroughly bombed by American bombers. This bread is from a bakery near the small fishing village that Barney ’s family lives in. They report the incident to the air base nearby. One of the officers at the air base is a friend of Barney’s, and asked him to spy for them on some people they believe to be Nazi sympathizers. The suspicious people turn out to be Nazi sympathizers, and they take Barney as a prisoner, for spying on them. They need a place to keep him, so they decide that the safest place is on board a U-Boat called the Sea Snake.
Southern Skies reprinted this book and all the other books by Steven W. Meader. They did a great job bringing this book back. If you would like this book, you can get a hardcover, paperback and even a vintage hardcover. All of them have the original Illustrations, which in this case show impressively accurate representations of the U-Boats and bombers. COOL!
Not a lot of people know about this book, and if I had my way —which isn’t likely!— I would have every person read it. I really love this book! I can’t recommend it enough!