Blue High Water (Shelley Birse, Macmillan, $19.95 pb, ISBN 9780330423663, October) **1/2

This young adult novel follows a year in the life of Fly (Fiona) Watson who has just won a scholarship to study at Blue Water High School. Seven teenagers every year are picked to live and train at the school, and eventually compete for the top prize which is awarded at the end of every year—a one-year sponsorship contract to surf the pro circuit and represent their school. Unfortunately for Fly, she is the youngest, shortest and least likely to win. As expected, by the end of the book Fly has overcome her fear of big waves, got the boy of her dreams and won the surf comp. Blue Water High was firstly a TV series and it won a Logie for Most Outstanding Children’s Show for 2006. Unfortunately this novelisation doesn’t equal the show in uniqueness and creativity, but that could be due to the difficult task of editing a whole TV series into 296 pages. Fans of the show will love this, but everyone else will be lost as to what all the fuss is about.

Anna Hood is a bookseller at Avid Reader Bookshop & Café, West End, Brisbane

This review from Australian Bookseller & Publisher magazine is reproduced by kind permission of Thorpe-Bowker, a division of R R Bowker LLC. © Copyright 2007, Thorpe-Bowker