Ultraviolet
Lesley Howarth

Puffin   2001

244p pbk $14.95

ISBN: 0-14-131078-2

This book is well ahead of its audience in that you need a dictionary next to you the whole time to keep up with the meanings of quite a few words; thus I would offer this book to older readers. They might have a clue what’s going on. This didn’t worry me very much though the basic meaning was easy to find in the end. The main problem with this book was that there was a plot that wasn’t followed, in fact when we find out what’s been going on the whole time it makes us more confused. I recommend reading the book through at least twice so you aren’t lost in the story. I say this because the reader has to remember back to the start of the book to the way things were in the beginning. Because of this, the book should have started in the middle of the story instead of the start.  But other than that, the story is one that an older age group would be more suited with as it doesn’t make for light reading. My personal recommendation is that you have a lot of free time, as this book will guzzle quite a few hours of back reading.

Damien, aged 15, Canberra, ACT

Ultraviolet is a story about a girl called Violet who lives in a future world where everyone has to stay out of the sun due to loss of the ozone layer allowing deadly ultraviolet rays in. She enjoys playing questholme, a virtual computer game and raising tadpoles into frogs. But her life is about to be changed when she learns that BluShield International, the makers of BluShield (one of the only types of plastic that filter off the harmful ultraviolet rays) are holding vast amounts of blu back from the public to keep its prices up, and her dad is somehow connected with it…

A great read that proposes a vast possible future. This book is a great read for someone in their teens but some of the wording is a bit hard to understand and catch onto. The book is quite good but not as good as her Maphead books and I don’t really understand the ending properly but by that time the characters were really full of detail.

Sam, Year 10, Canberra, ACT