The Last Whale

Chris Vick's The Last Whale is a climate adventure for 11 year olds about a girl who takes a very clever AI to an island with no internet.

What happens

Abi does NOT want to be on this holiday. Her school has just asked her not to come back for A levels. She's got a brand-new Earth Crisis tattoo her parents don't know about.

And in her army bag is one of fewer than twenty AI units in the world. She was meant to hand it back to the company that made it (she prefers to call it borrowing).

Then Dad drops the bombshell on the ferry. There's no wifi at Grandma's. For someone planning protests for a big climate summit, that's a disaster!

The journey north is gorgeous, all mountains and eagles. Waiting at the end is Bestemor, her very blunt Norwegian grandmother, who tells Abi to stop, swim and do nothing for a while.

Then there are the whales. They're late this year. One hot night the AI starts recording strange songs from the sea. When Abi runs out to listen, the water itself is glowing in time with the whale's song.

So what's it like to read? Abi is brilliant company. She's clever, prickly and quite a show-off, and you get everything she keeps to herself, like her heart thumping as her bag goes through the scanner.

The AI is very funny because it takes her completely literally. When she jokes about a bomb on the ferry, it offers to hack the ship and sound the alarm! And if the company ever works out where it is, it calmly tells her, they'll send drones.

Her little sister Tig is a joy too. Within a day she's spotted the tattoo and swapped her silence for a promise of whale-watching.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Abi is older than most heroines on this shelf. She got a tattoo she was too young for, and she hacked a big company's website. One of the slogans she left on it is a crude insult built on the word rape. The heatwave and the wildfires on the news are part of the story too.

A child who already worries about the climate might find that heavy. For a reader who cares about the planet and likes a good argument about how to save it, Abi will feel very real.

What to read next

If they want another girl heading north into a climate argument, try Beyond the Frozen Horizon. Rory flies to the Arctic with her geologist mum, whose company wants to reopen an old mine. She's stuck in the middle.