I read this on holiday recently, although, the first time I read this I must have been in year four or something. I read it again in year 8 which I can remember. It says it’s for aged 12-16 readers, so I’m only one year too old 😂.
Anyway, my sister had taken this book with her on our holiday and I decided to pick it up and relive my childhood. I finished it very quickly and it was just as good as I remember it being. I know it might sound a little silly, but it really was, and although the book is quite simple, I found that reading it from an older perspective made me see it in a slightly different light.
As I read the book when I was younger, I focused more on the story between Scarlett and Kian, but this time I looked at the whole plot from a wider lens, picking up on some of the finer details of the story.
Scarlett is a ‘troubled’ 12 year old girl who struggles in school. After being kicked out of her most recent school, her mum had lost hope and decided to send her to live with her dad, in Ireland. This of course was only after she had been sent to multiple relatives and been kicked out of the schools she enrolled in there. Scarlett hadn’t seen her dad since he left her and her mum for a woman named Claire who made artisan soaps, so she obviously wasn’t thrilled about this.
Once she arrived in Ireland, Scarlett saw that Claire was pregnant, which only increased her rage and her want to return to London. However, during her time there with her dad, Claire and her already born half-sister Holly, she learns that maybe they don’t deserve the hate she had for them.
Scarlett walks out on her first day of school in the small village she is now living in, and this is when her dad convinces her to try homeschooling. It’s also the day she meets a boy called Kian.
Throughout her experience in homeschooling, Scarlett decides to do a project based on the local loch. Almost every day she walks up to the loch with her materials in hand, yet almost everyday she is distracted by the mysterious boy she met when she ran away on her first day of school. Kian and Scarlett grow closer every day, until Kian says he has to leave the area.
There’s obviously a lot more to the story but I don’t like giving spoilers so I won’t.
Reading this at 17 made me realise how deep some of the topics covered in this book are and helped me to appreciate the fact that I was and still am an avid reader, and this exposes me to a wider range of universal topics.
Overall, I loved this book as much as I did in the past, so of course, I’ll give it 5 stars.
