Book emily winsnap11/24/2023 ![]() As I was reading the book to my five year old (admittedly not its intended audience) I found it very easy to skip parts of it, and not just some of the internal musings of Emily but also a lot of description and quite few parts of action (small-talk type conversations, moon gazing and toast eating scenes). They do seem tucked onto the main story as an afterthought though, as does quite a lot of scenes. The descriptions of the underwater world are vividly evocative if a bit gushy and florid. Emily is a bit more self-doubting than one would expect (perhaps because she is a girl, perhaps because heroics are not in fashion nowadays) but gets there in the end. One day Emily find a mysterious, magical diamond ring and unleashes a series of events that will take her to the castle of the title, expose her to Neptune's curse and unravel a mystery surrounding the whole issue of human-mer intermarriage.Īs you can see, Emily Windsnap and The Castle in the Mist is an underwater fantasy adventure story and as such works well: a lot happens, not all of it predictable, the plot moves at reasonable speed and the characters engage in normal adventure story type heroics. Emily Windsnap of the title is a semi-mer, half mermaid, half human (that means mermaid in water, human on land), living with her human mother and merman father on a semi-submerged old pirate ship on All-Points Island, going to mermaid school where she meets her best friend Shona, does Ocean Studies but also learns how to adorn her tail and sit gracefully on rocks. Emily Windsnap and The Castle in the Mist is a third book in a series by Liz Kessler. The main character is 12 and the book is clearly aimed at (and will probably appeal to) girls aged 7-11. But perhaps it's wrong - after all the 'cross-over' idea also often leads to clumsy results.Įmily Windsnap and The Castle in the Mist is clearly a book for junior school aged girls. ![]() They seem a tad mercenary and product-like to me. I am bit suspicious of books that are clearly aimed at a particular demographic. Liz Kessler popped into Bookbag Towers to chat to us. If you have a daughter of suitable age who is into things magical and mermaidy, you might as well borrow this, but don't buy, especially for the full hardback price. Nothing special, but not terrible either. Teenage psychology underlying Emily's adventure will enable many to relate to her especially those dealing with mixed family background, or any worried about fitting in and their own identity. Ages 8-12.Summary: Enjoyable but underwhelming fantasy adventure which will for sure be enjoyed by many girls. The jewel-toned jacket art and ink-wash illustrations sprinkled throughout add girlish charm to an imaginative story. Coincidences drive the plot-Shona has recently studied illegal mermaid-human marriages in school a creepy lightkeeper drops a key that unlocks a treasure chest containing a file spelling out the entire backstory. Newcomer Kessler anchors her fantasy in the nitty-gritty of adolescence: Emily bests a bully who comes close to guessing her secret, and she finds a best friend in Shona, a mermaid she meets during her nightly swims. At night, she sneaks from the boat where she lives with her mother to explore the undersea world, and unravel the mystery of her genetics-which involves her long-missing, never-discussed father. She hops out of the water before she can be branded a freak, but she's hooked. Before Emily's first kick turn she feels her legs melding into a tail. Despite never having had a lesson, she takes to the water like, well, a fish. Pre-teen girls will likely bite at this novel's tempting bait, offered in the opening lines: "Can you keep a secret? Everybody has secrets, of course, but mine's different." Emily Windsnap, who narrates, is half-mermaid, as she discovers, inconveniently, in her seventh-grade swim class.
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