Set in Cornwall, Ingo is the story of Sapphire and her brother Conor, and what happens to them after their father mysteriously disappears at sea. Sapphire still thinks her father is alive. Somewhere. She remembers stories he used to tell her about a Mer creature who fell in love with a human, but could not come to live with him in the dry air.
The following summer, both Conor and Sapphire are inexorably drawn to the water, despite the worries of their mother. They love the water so much, and spend hours in the nearby cove. When Sapphire follows Conor one day, after he has been gone a long time, she meets Faro--a Merman who introduces her to Ingo, an underwater world she could only have dreamed existed. And Ingo blood runs deep through her veins and it is not long before the call of that other world becomes too strong to resist.
Dunmore is an accomplished writer for adults, she was the first winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction, but her books for younger readers, despite having all the same qualities and powerful storytelling talent, have not been as critically or commercially successful. Ingo, however, is sure to change that perception. It is a beautiful novel, both enchanting and exciting, that appeals to readers on many levels. It is seductively easy to read and stays in the memory for a long time.
(Age 10 and over) --John McLay
]]>Paul, meanwhile, weds Louise, and his "passion of protectiveness" immediately draws Johnnie into the heart of their marriage. Needless to say, the bride may well wish for less of a ménage à trois:
He sat across the kitchen table from me, smiling, and told me there'd been a complete fuck-up over manufacturing acid in a farmhouse in Herefordshire. He would have made a million. It was always a million with Johnnie: some glittering amount of money that you couldn't really pin down.... We let ourselves think he was like a child. It was the angle we looked at him. When you see a cat play, if you can call it play, you thank God it's the size it is.But after giving birth to a daughter, Louise attempts to drown her own secrets with drink, beginning a slow progression of loss that will drag down her family in its wake. "I could look back and show you each step of the way that's got us here," she recalls, mapping her melancholy journey. Yet when Louise is presented with one last chance to save Johnnie from himself, some sort of redemption seems in the offing.
Dunmore's success here, as in such earlier novels as Talking to the Dead and Your Blue-Eyed Boy, is her ability to combine sublime prose with a swift and sure-footed narrative. Yet With Your Crooked Heart also goes beyond this alchemy of poetry and plot: it delivers an understated, emphatic study of alcoholism, adult self-delusion, and the emotional relativity of all relationships in a world where "not being able to trust yourself is the biggest thrill of all." --Rachel Holmes
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