North of Nowhere by Liz Kessler

This is another of those precious little harbacks from Orion. I do love the look and feel of these books. They bring back all the charm of childhood. They're the right size for a kid's hands with beautifully illustrated dustcovers and interesting end papers and North of Nowhere with its stormy sea cover and vermilion endpapers is no exception.

 

This is the first of Liz Kessler's books that I've read and I wasn't disappointed. She has a delightful writing style which immediately sucks the reader into thirteen year old Mia's mind and then takes youoff on a fast-paced mystery adventure that has you guessing right up to the end.

 Mia's grandad has vanished and her grandma is at her wits end trying to make sense of what's happened while coping with running the pub/hotel they both own. So Mia's mum decides she has to go and help her and as it's half term Mia has to come along too. Mia is firstly furious, then horrifed and finally guilty. The prospect of a week away from her friends in the sleepy little seaside village of Porthaven where her grandparents live fills her with dread but she loves her grandparents dearly and is just as worried as everyone else about what might have happened to grandad.

Things don't quite turn out as expected though. Firstly Mia discovers a journal, written apparently by a girl of a similar age to herself, on a boat moored at the old dock. Mia christens the writer Dee because she always finishes her journal entries with the letter D, and she is so struck by the apparent similarities in their interests that she starts to write replies to Dee's journal entries. After the predicatble spat - 'Who are you, and why are you reading my PRIVATE diary?' - the two girls settle into a friendly correspondence and even make plans to meet up at the end of the week, assuming the local weather is good enough for Dee to travel to the mainland from the tiny island where she lives.

There's also a bit of potential love interest in the form of another half-term visitor to Porthaven, Peter, although Mia is struck by how comfortable she feels with him and how different that is to how she usually feels around boys.

As the week progresses Mia's relationship with both Peter and Dee strengthen and she wakes up on the Friday morning bursting with excitement about the forthcoming meeting with Dee. But disappointment comes swiftly when she discovers the boat and Dee's journal message that the seas are too dangerous and her father won't let her go with him.

At this point the plot becomes increasingly exciting as Peter and Mia try to make their own way over to the island and are nearly drowned in the process, and then it becomes even more mysterious too, although I can't explain why without revealing too much of the plot. The explanation for everything that has happened is clever and complete, although for me, the magic involved didn't sit comfortably with the totally believeable realism of the rest of the book.

That quibble aside, this is an exciting, easy to read book with great characters and some nail-biting moments. There's great poignancy in the denouement too and I'm sure it will please and delight many a young girl.

The lovely folks at Orion Books provided this review copy. If you want one for yourself, (it's out on January 17th 2013) then please click through from here and Amazon will make a small contribution to the maintenance of this blog.