Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun

Liz Kessler's Emily Windsnap and the Land of the Midnight Sun is a mermaid adventure for 10 year olds that begins with a kidnapping on the seabed.

What happens

Emily is nearly thirteen and she's never been happier. Aaron is her boyfriend now (she hasn't said the word out loud yet, but she says it in her head a lot). Short, wild storms keep hitting Brightport every morning, and Emily really couldn't care less.

Her best friend Shona isn't so cheerful. Emily knows she keeps dropping her to be with Aaron, and she feels pretty bad about it.

Then a swim with Aaron goes very wrong. Emily is caught in a net, blindfolded and gagged, and dragged to a locked cave deep under the sea. Aaron turns up in a net too. And the boss the kidnappers are working for? Neptune himself.

The king of all the oceans has a problem. He's been having terrible dreams every night, and those morning storms are his nightmares spilling out. Worse, he thinks the dreams are memories somebody once hid from him. He's frightened. Who knew Neptune could be scared?

He needs Emily and Aaron for a mission so secret they can't even tell their parents. It's somewhere in the far north, where the summer sun doesn't set. All they've got to go on is a lake that doesn't reflect what's really around it and a glacier shaped like a giant's tongue.

Emily tells the story herself and she's very good company. She's terrified one minute and having a cheeky go at Neptune in her head the next. When he lists all the danger ahead, she just thinks "Oh, was that all?" The two kidnappers are funny too ("Hold your halibut!").

It's worth knowing there's quite a bit of first romance in this one. Emily and Aaron hold hands, go bright red a LOT and get teased by the grown-ups. Their kiss even matters to the magic, so it's part of the story rather than a side bit.

If your reader groans at soppy scenes, that might be a lot. If they're starting to wonder about crushes themselves, they'll probably love it.

This is the fifth Emily Windsnap book and it carries straight on from the others. If your reader hasn't met Emily yet, start them on The Tail of Emily Windsnap.

What to read next

If they'd like another king of the sea who isn't telling the whole story, try The Little Mermaid: Against the Tide. Ariel's dad, King Triton, goes very quiet when she asks to invite everyone to her big ceremony, and his crab adviser Sebastian clearly knows more than he's letting on.