Cristy Burne, Into the Blue, Fremantle Press, April 2024, 128 pp., RRP $14.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781760993870
Blair ‘gets’ to snorkelling these school holidays, but at least his cousin Drew is with him. Drew is eager and fun and a good friend. This helps Blair feel a bit braver when the water is terrifyingly cold. The water isn’t so bad after a while and Blair’s mind wonders about the sunken ship they are exploring and what treasures could be hidden in the wreck. Distraction leads to a catastrophic lapse: where has the GoPro gone? Sorry, not the GoPro, Marcus’s GoPro. The GoPro it took months for Marcus to save up for and buy with his own money. The GoPro used to film Marcus’s killer skateboard moves which he wants to enter into a competition.
Just as surely as the Omeo is wrecked on the bottom of the ocean, so has Blair’s life now descended into a dark, water mess from which there seems to be no rescue.
Lots of young readers are going to relate to Blair’s raging emotions as he tries to work out how he is going to handle this disaster. Blair knows his mum remembers lost drink bottles and school jumpers from last year, so she’s never going to forget about a stolen and then lost GoPro. There is a moral tug-of-war going on in his mind. Does he own up to his mistake, or does he let everyone think the GoPro went missing some other way? He wants to confess, because the guilt is irrepressible. But how do to own up to a mistake this large?
Into the Blue is a short chapter book ideal for strong readers in Grade 2-4, and struggling or reluctant readers in older year levels. My only criticism is that the cover makes the book appear as if it is for younger readers, the characters seem to be about 6 or 7 years old. Blair’s age is never revealed in the text (a clever decision), but my impression is that he was older than the children on the cover. Even the images on pages 29 and 38 of the book seem to depict Blair as a 11 or 12 year old.
This book could easily be added to a take home reader collection in a school to extend strong readers or handed to weaker readers as a book that can be finished in about half an hour of reading, giving them a notch on their reading log. And I really think it will be finished. I was drawn in by the question about how this would end. Was the truth going to come out, or was Blair going to learn to live with the guilt?
Reviewed by Cherie Bell
