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Title: Between Two Seas (you can Buy on Amazon here)
Author: Marie-Lousie Jensen
Published: 3rd January 2008
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Genre: Romance, Mystery, Historical, Children’s Literature
Pages: 320
Format: E-Book
Rating: ***** (5 Stars)
About: Bound by a vow made to her dying mother, Marianne sells her few belongings and leaves Grimsby. Her destination? Denmark, where she will search for her father, Lars Christensen-the golden-haired fisherman her mother fell in love with many years before.
The journey will be long and dangerous for a young girl traveling alone. As Marianne boards the fishing boat that will carry her across the North Sea, she wonders: will Denmark be the fairy-tale land she has dreamt of? Will she find happiness there? Will the father she has never met welcome the arrival of his illegitimate child?
And why didn’t he return to her mother, as he promised he would?
Review: This is Marie-Louise Jensen’s first ever book and wow what a story. When reading please be prepared to be swept into another world.
It was admittedly a little slow at the start, but I think the details that were given were needed to set the story and give the reader an in-depth understanding of the main character.
It clearly meant a great deal to the main character to fulfill her mother’s wishes and then to have her trek across the sea to find her father – the man who abandoned her mother – is such a courageous moment. Here we have a young girl who has lost everything in a search for a man who she knows nothing about.
She has nothing, nothing to fall back on and an empty future to look forward to and yet she still strides on, even when things become tough, she manages to make the most of the situation. This truly does make her a likable character, one who, as a reader, I really could imagine.
There wasn’t a time when I felt that Jensen had stretched the story too far, it all flowed and made perfect sense. The descriptions that were given were perfect – not too much and not too little, a perfect balance.
Although this novel was written with young adults in mind, it would suit readers of any age. It is a good, easy enough book to read and thoroughly enjoyable.
The ending is admittedly predictable but there are still some twists which I would never have guessed. All in all, it makes for a very happy book, one that I managed to read quite quickly in one sitting.
CastlesandTurrets 