A tense children's story of myth, mystery and legends.
Our characters go in search of the mermaid of the lake. But as the legend starts to unravel, her dark powers show and it reveals an ugly truth. Are the girls in terrible, watery danger?.
Hidden messages can be found about friendship and doing the right thing which make for a thought provoking read for any young reader. A enjoyable read.

I love anything mermaid related so wanted to give this a go.
The writing is good but I didn’t feel really connected to the story and kept putting it to one side. I will likely revisit it at a later date to finish it

An utterly beautiful read packed with mystery and legend but rooted in very real-world issues of self-worth and identity. Spellbinding.

Vivien always tries to keep everyone happy and not cause any fuss, but in her head she's really funny and sarcastic. She wants so desperately to be normal, with a typical family and non-frizzy hair, and lots of friends. But despite this her moral compass never goes too far astray. Her best friend Eleni is kind of bitchy, she seems to care more about impressing the cooler than cool Hero. I thought her second-best friend Eric should definitely be promoted to first!
Vivien doesn't even really believe in the mermaid but her desires for a new friend and to make her mum take more of an interest in her, it makes her do anything to help Alice with her search. While following the instructions to find the mermaid, she starts to doubt her convictions, maybe the mermaid is real, and maybe that's not such a good thing?
This was such an uplifting read which kept me rooting for Vivien the whole time. I really wanted her to realise she's wonderful just the way she is.

A really captivating and enchanting read that I read in one sitting. It is a really good read that I think children will love and learn a lot from.

Vivien knows that mermaids don't exist. But she also knows they have to exist – at least in the public eye. For there would be nothing to Lake Splendour – a far northern English resort – without them. A hundred years and change ago, two teenaged girls allegedly spent months with mermaids, but were forced to return to help out with the Great War effort. They also showed female emancipation, which helped create the town's tourism industry, now faded and falling apart but once a feminist success story. Alice, a girl who stumbles into Vivien's gran's tourist shop one day, knows she certainly wants mermaids to exist – she thinks her family's black sheep died searching for them, or else was just too successful in her hunt. When the shy, doubting Thomasina that is Vivien collides with the exuberant, gung-ho Alice, what on earth – or perhaps in water – will they find?

I have to report I certainly found an ungainly beginning. Yes, the prologue is short, but it doesn't help us understand who and what and where and why at all. But then the story goes to the other extreme – first by presenting a tourist office piece of puff, and then having Vivien debate with her erstwhile best friend the claims of lookism and sexism the more 'woke' students are directing at the annual mermaid pageant, and then in having her show the town museum to Alice and discuss it all yet again. Looks and the 'style' of the mermaid are strong themes here, as Vivien, a water baby herself, hates her hair and thinks her inability to fit in is what is keeping her cruise ship-working mother away, seemingly permanently. And of course, her looks will be important when the theme of her crush on Alice comes to the fore.

And if ''crush'' is too strong a word, that's partly the book's fault, I feel, for a lot of this seems overblown. Appearance-based bullying is apparently endemic, Vivien and her best boy mate only talk tourism shop as that's the only life they know, while Alice and her grandmother – or should that be ''versus'' her grandmother – is once again OTT. Perhaps that's to make sure that when the high drama, the more action-based and less mundane happenings, occur they don't feel out of place.

And it's these scenes that are where this book shines. Forget the contrivance by which they come about, the drama on the water and the spookier nocturnal efforts to connect with the mer-folk are certainly well done. They are what give this book the distinctive feel – a ghostly mermaid that has to be summonsed, 'fetched' or contacted like some spectral ''Candyman'' figure is not the routine fairytale variant of the species. And those scenes with what they lead to actually sell the book – and they sell, as in justify, all the many, many scenes of self-doubt, alienation and antagonism that have gone before.

For that ultimately is the theme of the piece, the disconnect a young girl can feel. Alice rails against ''controlling Oldies'', and in the end Vivien feels the need to seek the mermaids she was always sceptical about because she has far too little kinship with anyone else around, to some extent a lack of parental security, and what the tourist figures of mermaids tell her is a non-conformist look. Those themes point of course to the target readers here – and I have to admit that had I ever been a near-pubescent girl I would have gelled with this a lot more than it sounds like I did. I'll state the obvious to close, however, that this book should have been subtle and controlled enough to make sure people outside the expected audience can enjoy it – I doubt boys will take to this well at all, and therefore miss all the closing surprises, and in sticking to one demographic it loses any chance of becoming a classic. To the intended reader this is a more than serviceable prospect, however. Three and a half stars.

My 8 year old daughter flew through this in a couple of hours. She read it , in two sittings. A sure sign of a captivating read!

She really liked the characters and in her own words “ I actually learned that it’s ok to stop being friends with someone if you don’t have things in common and it’s important to do things that feel right to you and don’t do things just because someone else wants to”

A read that really held her interest and she learned an important lesson from it! Recommend.