Rescue on Nim’s Island

Wendy Orr's Rescue on Nim's Island is an island adventure for 8 year olds about a girl whose secret home is about to be full of strangers.

What happens

It opens with emails, which is a lovely way in. Nim is writing to her friend Edmund, and she is not happy.

Her dad Jack has invited four scientists to stay for a conference about turning algae into fuel. Nim and Jack have spent their whole lives keeping this island secret. Now seven strangers are coming for three days.

She signs off her emails the way you rather wish everybody would. As mad as a hermit crab who has lost her shell. As excited as Fred with a smashed-open coconut. (Fred is an iguana. Spiky as a dragon, with a cheerful snub nose.)

Edmund is grounded and desperate to come. He negotiates his way out of it by washing up every night, taking out the rubbish, keeping his room tidy and babysitting the naughtiest twins in the world for two whole Saturdays.

Then the boat arrives. Two of the visitors step ashore and give their names, and Nim knows instantly that those are not the names her dad was expecting.

It's a brilliant moment. You spot it at the same second she does, and neither of you can prove a single thing.

The whole thing is sunny and salty and fast. Nim starts the book up a palm tree with a spyglass, a whistling shell and a fat red pocketknife on cords round her neck. She gets about by holding on to a sea lion. The chapters are short and the emails break everything up, so it moves along at a clip.

There's a quieter thing running underneath. Nim has only recently worked out that she might want friends her own age, and now she's gone shy about meeting Edmund in front of a crowd. He's gone shy too. Two children who have been happily chatting by email for months, standing on a beach with nothing to say.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The two adults who arrive under false names are dangerous, and the danger ends up aimed at the children rather than the grown-ups. Nim is eventually made to choose between saving the island and saving a life. For a child who finds adults-who-lie genuinely frightening, that might be a lot for this shelf. For one who likes a proper villain and a rescue, it's the best part of the book.

This comes some way into Nim's story, but you're never left behind. It mentions the time Jack was lost at sea and the time a cruise ship stole her sea lion as it goes.

What to read next

If they want more of just Nim and her animals, the first Nim's Island book is the one where Jack sails off for three days and doesn't come back when he should.