Nessie Quest, by Melissa Savage
Nessie Quest, by Melissa Savage
Headed into the summer before seventh grade, Ada Ru is hoping against all hope that her parents are finally going to bring her to Disney World. Buuut, no such luck:
And then . . . he says it.
He lays a bomb on me that changes my entire life. With just one line, and believe me, it’s got nothing to do with dreams coming true either.
“We are spending the entire summer in Scotland.”
No warning.
No doomsday prep.
No You had better sit down for this one.
It has to be a joke. I give him a good long stare while I wait for the punch line.
Except there isn’t one.
Ada Ru knows next to nothing about Scotland—her only frame of reference is her Harry Potter knowledge—and she is pretty much determined to NOT enjoy herself while she’s there.
But then she meets another American kid who’s there for the summer, and a Scottish kid who works for one of the local loch tours, and sort of despite herself, she gets pulled into THE SEARCH FOR NESSIE!! Or, as the title has it: she joins a NESSIE QUEST.
It’s an easy-going, light, often funny read. It’s got heart coming out of its ears, as does Ada Ru herself. But while she has a whole lot of heart, she also has a SERIOUS temper and some lessons to learn—about giving unfamiliar places and people a chance, about the right and wrong time to keep a secret, about taking other peoples’ feelings into account.
One of my favorite things about Nessie Quest—and given that this is a book about a budding writer with a solid understanding of genre conventions AND about cryptozoology, two things I love VERY MUCH, this is going to sound odd—was how Savage played with language.
I can’t speak to whether or not the Scottish dialect and slang that the characters use is remotely authentic, but I CAN say that I loved seeing Ada Ru start to roll various phrases into her everyday speech—at first, you can tell that she’s being somewhat silly about it, but then it clearly becomes habit.
Even better than that, though, is what happens with the walkie-talkie code that she and her new friends use—some of that language gets incorporated into their everyday speech, and they start throwing it around ALL THE TIME, regardless of whether they’re on the radio or not, and regardless of whether there’s anyone else around to even hear them. Same goes with inside jokes—we see the jokes get made for the first time, and then we see how references to those jokes end up in their vernacular. Again, it all becomes habit. Not at all the point of the book, but it’s genuinely fun to see language and slang evolve and spread over the course of the action, and it makes for a richer reading experience.
People talk a lot about world-building when it comes to fantasy and SF, but it’s so so important in realistic stories, too.
Note: I have loads of library kids who are Harry Potter fans, so I’m used to chatter about old HP and so on, but hoo boy, it’s really too bad that his creator has turned out to be such a jerk. She was name-dropped quite a few times—more her characters than her actual name, but definitely some mentions of her as well—and I was surprised at how distracting I found it. My back went up every single time, sigh.
Note 2: Ada Ru is a very young seventh-grader and Dax is a very mature eighth-grader, and their mutual attraction read somewhat odd at times. So much so that I wondered if they were completely different ages in an early draft or something similar.
