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This book review also appears on our book sales site a Ingo by Helen Dunmore.

Taking as its backdrop the deep romance of the Cornish coast, Ingo  -  the first volume of a planned trilogy for children - is a tale of enchantment and reality in equal measure, qualities which are reflected in the struggle between the worlds of land and sea.  The young heroine's circumstances are very modern and very realistic: her father has apparently abandoned his family, leaving his wife to struggle to keep the family and finances afloat.

But Sappy and her elder brother Conor know better.  They don't believe the official explanation that he was lost at sea nor the whispers of neighbours that he has run off with another woman. 

Dunmore builds upon a traditional Cornish tale of a young man seduced by a mermaid.  Sappy's longing for her father is infused with the tales her father told her of the mermaid of Zennor who fell for a human man but couldn't live with him on land.  She would swim up the stream to hear him sing and then, one day, the young man swam out to sea with her to join the people of the Mer in their underwater forever.  As Sappy and Conor take their search for their father to the edge of reality first Conor, and then Sappy, are enticed into the bewitching and mysterious world of the Mer by the enigmatic merman, Faro, and his mermaid sister.

The sea and Ingo - the underwater world of the Mer - are powerful and ever-present: menacing for those who don’t understand or respect it, enchanting to those few who, like Sappy and Conor, know of its existence.  Ingo is full of adventure and danger, steadily but surely rising to a magnificent and magical underwater battle which tests Conor and Sappy mentally and physically. 

Ingo builds on themes that will be resonant to many children today.  Sappy's desire to go back to a time when childhood was innocent is something all can relate to and her difficulty in accepting her mother's new boyfriend will also strike a cord with many.  The meat of the book is however in the struggle between to worlds, between two types of living, neither of which Sappy really understands.

The plot is fast-paced and involving - a real page-turner.  But there is enough of substance created by Dunmore's balance of reality and fantasy to provoke reflection among even the least imaginative of us.  Parents will enjoy reading Ingo with their children as much as the youngest will enjoy keeping its magical world to themselves.

This is the first of Helen Dunmore's books I've read since A Spell of Winter, which won the very first Orange Prize for Fiction in 1996. I'm glad I did.  Don't read this if you don't have room for another favourite book on your bookshelves because this one will demand a place.

Ingo by Helen Dunmore will be published in hardback on 5th September 2005 by HarperCollins. ISBN 0007204876