The Lost Whale by Hannah Gold and Levi Pinfold
| The Lost Whale by Hannah Gold and Levi Pinfold | |
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| Category: Confident Readers | |
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Reviewer: John Lloyd
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| Summary: Can this escape the fact it's the second book in a few months to do very, very similar things, from nautical setting to trouble with mothers to visual brilliance? I sincerely hope the book world has room for both in its hearts. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 320 | Date: March 2022 |
| Publisher: HarperCollinsChildren’sBooks | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 9780008412944 | |
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Rio is going from London to California for four weeks, whether he likes it or not, but will learn a lot of things while there. The reason he's there is that his mother's mother is the best host he could have, with her wooden chalet right on the edge of the Pacific, and because his mother may be something like bipolar and has been prescribed four weeks' isolation and care. Angry at being in a place and with a person he cannot recognise, Rio finds some solace in the womb-like noise of the breaking waves and in the footprints in the wooden flooring that mark the birthplace of his mother's violinist career, and he also finds intrigue when he discovers that an early love of his mother's life had been the grey whales that annually migrate to and fro just outside the bedroom windows...
The adult sees an issue with this book early on. In amongst the thoroughly affecting writing, we see Rio immediately hopeful that the whales will somehow 'cure' his mother. Surely the book won't have the same, naive intentions, when it goes all-out to suggest this is what will happen? The target audience sees, as you might easily guess, just the thoroughly affecting writing. (And the artwork – and the last time anything about Levi Pinfold was at all shabby was when he walked home from school still in his sports kit. Yes, I guess, but.)
The theme of saving and being saved is definitely evident here, whatever your age. The adult will go on from thinking it's a book about saving the mother to saving Rio, but there is also the aspect of saving the whales and the entire ocean, and it has to be said – again, probably only for people older than to whom this book is destined and to the very cynical – this is done a little clunkily. Oh, the waves and the ocean will mimic his mindset? Oh dear – clunky.
Happily, however, this was a quite exceptional read in the finish. For all that clunkiness and cheese, little of it will register with younger audiences, and there is still power (much as is said of cheap music) in the trite. This takes a story that does the obvious, pulling on the expected heartstrings and dutifully hitting nerves in a paint-by-numbers fashion, and yet just utterly, utterly succeeds. Rio is a fine character, the titular whale is a fine character, and when the two do meet there is a sterling, wrenching emotional quality to everything. This is a book containing the obvious, sometimes the cloying and perhaps the overwrought – and yet one that is still fluttering with the outstanding. Tears with the same saltiness as its Pacific setting should not be unexpected, with this powerful and seriously evocative writing. Two from two with this author, then.
I must thank the publishers for my review copy.
I am seeing the birth, I think, of a new fashion in tweenage adventures, where the focus of the book is what the power of the natural world can do to effect their real life dramas. You can see it in Wrath by Marcus Sedgwick – and you can definitely see it in Julia and the Shark by Kiran Millwood Hargrave and Tom de Freston, a book so similar in themes and content – and consummate visual delivery – you fear it has too much of a march on the book at hand.
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You can read more book reviews or buy The Lost Whale by Hannah Gold and Levi Pinfold at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Lost Whale by Hannah Gold and Levi Pinfold at Amazon.com.
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