The Deep – Selkie Warrior

Finn Black's Selkie Warrior is a Deep adventure for 7 year olds in which a family of underwater explorers is steered into a cyclone on purpose.

What happens

The prologue does the setting up. A pirate called Captain Hammerhead takes an envelope of money on a harbour wall and sells a woman named Edwina the one thing she wants to know. The Nektons have the Esgis aboard. Edwina then hacks their satellite feed, so no warning about the cyclone ahead of them will ever arrive.

Meanwhile the Nektons are eating fortune cookies.

Ant has bought a small mountain of them in Hong Kong and is reading them out. His says today is the day to show someone you care, so he kisses his fish tank. His big sister Fontaine is unimpressed. Their parents Will and Kaiko are driving the Aronnax, the family submarine, a thousand metres down and a few hundred kilometres from the Arafura Sea, and Kaiko has just noticed the connection is dead.

What makes this work for a seven-year-old is how ordinary the family stays inside the extraordinary. The brother and sister bicker exactly the way brothers and sisters do. The mother says not now, Ant, I'm trying to navigate. The danger builds while somebody is still arguing about whether a fish counts as a person.

Ant is the heart of it. He's the one who wants to know what Arafura means, and why the ancient orb he found in a kelp forest lights up when he holds it, and where the route it's tracing actually goes. Mysteries are made to be solved, he says. Nobody else on the boat is quite so certain.

It's written in plain sentences, with a lot of underwater kit named and explained as it goes, so a reader who likes knowing how things work gets fed rather than hurried past.

This isn't the first of these, and it's fairly open about it. Ant has already found one of the two orbs and already followed a symbol to a dragon's lair, and there's clearly a longer trail behind him. None of that stops your reader following this one, but they may finish it wanting the earlier books rather than the next.

Nothing in it is nasty. There's a cyclone, a villain who says she'd do anything, and a good deal of peril, all of it the sort a seven-year-old enjoys being slightly worried by from the safety of the sofa.

What to read next

If they'd like to see where that orb came from, Dragon Rider is in the library. Ant finds it buried under a mound of sand in a kelp forest, dirty green and about the size of a cricket ball, and spends a fortnight secretly cleaning it up before he tells anyone.