Selan

This is quite a unique book to me, and not one that I would expect Tim Bowler to write. In my experience, his books tend to be about bullying or gangs or people being bullied BY gangs, or running away from gangs and...You get the picture. Mainly gang-related stuff.

Whereas this story was about an isolated community, about grief and loss (and NOT the countless amounts of YA novels where some lost love commits suicide and then the protag has to recover from it over a long period of time, that's really getting monotonous). The main character was quite well-written and I enjoyed quite a lot of the other characters too.

In a way this story was about life and death. I do think Hetty was crazy to do what she did though. She's a 15-year old girl and she takes it upon herself to takes this dying woman home, by sneaking onto the village's only ship to make a long voyage which almost kills her in the process? I...how...?

Anyway, Hetty is a very strong character and showed a lot of bravery and strong mentality throughout the story. She never stopped giving up and was very resilient and I liked that about her. Her grandma was also a great character and reminded me of a few of my relatives. Also, for some reason I really liked Mackie especially, always standing up for Hetty, and i almost wish he had a bigger part to play in this book.

I can't really think of anything to improve upon in this book, except that the ending where Hetty says she wants to stay at Haga seems *slightly* rushed. She makes it to this next island and makes the decision she wants to stay here forever? As does her grandma? Well, okay.

Overall this was a very enjoyable read, although it doesn't come through until possibly halfway through the book.