book review 2

Ultramarine is about Ned (11) and Nell (8) and how they find out who their real parents are and about their history which hey have previously been kept in the dark about by Leah who is the person who adopted them after their parents died in a car crash. It starts out with how Leah finds a new partner and then went to their honeymoon and so get their grandma to look after them. However their grandma has never before been in such a populated place and only came because her old home by the sea got washed away. Because of this change in living she has gone a bit mad and always has nightmares about the sea. Because of this their aunt also comes and so tells them about their history. Also one night the grandma has another nightmare but the children think a wave actually came into the house and bought with it a person named Arion who has some kind of relationship with them. Arion lives with the sea just like his wife ultramarine did and he also helps save some of the seabirds that were cover in oil. I think Jenny Nimmo put this in her book because it was written in 1990, the year after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. In the end Leah and her partner come back from the honeymoon and everything is fine again.

I found this book very confusing and even after finishing the book I still did not get it. I also do not know why the title is called ultramarine because the book does not even mention ultramarine much so I think maybe the title Arion would be more appropriate. I also think that the book switches between different people too much and it does not really have a plot at all and if it does have one, I for one did not grasp it. Before writing this review I actually went on to the internet and read two reviews of the book so that I could write what the book was about reasonably well. This book is in my opinion a lot worse than the other books I have read from Jenny Nimmo although I have only read from one series before I read this book. Jenny Nimmo also made a mistake by making the names of the two main characters, Ned and Nell so similar as that just confused me and I thought for a few times while reading “which one is that, the younger one or the older one?” My last major grumble is that the ending was not strong and did not really finish off the story.

One thing I do like however is the way she connected the book to the environmental catastrophe that that had happened, as I said before, just a year before the book was published. Overall I think that this book is not for a person who wants to read good books and is for people aged 11+. I would give this book a 5.5/10 rating.