The novel is set in the Pacific Islands, a location well known to Beth as she has worked as a teacher there and is married to a Solomon Islander. She not only captures the variety of natural settings on the page, but also the modern Islander society and the tension between the poor local population and the tourism they are dependent upon.

Her main characters are also very well defined. Hector and Lily are struggling to find a future in a world of parental neglect, poverty and boredom. Their family lives are equally as important to the story as the adventure. By making the two characters friends rather than siblings, Beth is able to provide a broader spectrum of daily Islander existence.

Hector and Lily’s adventure is linked to the past by the parallel story of two young lovers during the time of Japanese occupation. Tepu is forced to work for the Japanese to construct an airfield and keep it in repair in spite of the frequent bombings. Like Japanese prisoners everywhere, each day is a struggle to survive. Edouwe manages to stay on the Island in order to care for her grandparents who have been confined to the leper colony for many years.

The adventure begins when Hector and Lily find a Japanese sword, a relic from the war. After Lily hides it away at home, she starts to experience dreams of a angry Japanese soldier. The plot of the novel involves solving the mystery of the sword and resolving the crimes of the past.

Although the cover of the book promotes it as a rollicking adventure story, I feel it has far more in common with Parvana and Secrets in the Fire than Alex Rider.
The structure of the book is also a little disconcerting. Tepu’s story of the war opens each chapter, and then suddenly the story moves to Hector and Lily’s modern tale. Since the two stories don’t link until the very end of the book, I feel that they might be better told as separate chapters. If this series is intended, as many are today, for reluctant readers, my experience has shown that shorter chapters are better.

I also feel Beth as included a lot of unnecessary gimmicks in her story. The birthmark is totally irrelevant, serving only to set Lily apart as different, and therefore she must be psychic. The American girl, Christine, who gets involved with Hector and Lily’s adventure plays no significant part in the plot and her relationship with the Islander children strains the credibility of the novel.

Don’t get me wrong. I will be happy to put this book on the shelf in the library. It will add to the range of fiction I suggest to middle school girls who are looking to read something modern about life in other countries. But I won’t be promoting it as one of the 10 best books I have read this year.

What a lovely, funny book!! For an author whose experience is in writing for younger children, this YA novel has a freshness about its style that is thoroughly enjoyable.

Briefly, if such a book can be summarized…Gemma is a 14 year old trying to find her own place in the world. At the start of the book her older sister has just become engaged to a boy that she has known for only a few weeks. But Debbie never does anything by half measures. Gemma gets dragged through all the wedding preparations, up to and including being flower girl in a swan costume. At school Gemma has fallen for a boy who doesn’t even know she exists, and to get near to him she decides to audition for the school play. She promptly gets paired off for rehearsal with the school freak. And a birkett? Well that is the Stone family term for a massive temper tantrum. Debbie and her father regularly indulge.

This book is a lot of fun. And those familiar with The Tempest may find literary allusions. What is it about Shakespeare? (See my review of Macbeth and Son.)

Much to my surprise, I enjoyed this book very much. It’s a light read and very difficult to categorize because it touches on many, many themes. It is a book about life at school, an book about finding friends, a book about becoming yourself, an adventure story, and about the importance of family. If I ticked all those categories on the blog, there would be no space left for anything else.

Jackson, the narrator, is a young teenager barely managing the stress of daily life. His fascination for numbers borders on obsessive/compulsive. To his mind the number 8 is perfection and number 7 is trouble. So it is safe to make friends with the girl who lives across the road in number 68, but that car with the license plate reading 777 is danger.  Jackson has problems with a bully at school and his Mum, a professional singer, can’t seem to hold a job, or even stay in one place very long at all.

Year 7 holds all kinds of stresses for Jackson, and the reader is included in all of them. We share his first kiss. We are there when he rescues the primary school boy from bullies. And it is this very immediacy that keeps us reading caught up in Jackson’s story as though it were our own.