Aquamarine, by Alice Hoffman

Aquamarine is the story of 2 girls who find a mermaid in the pool at the Capri Beach Club. Hailey and Claire, have to get the mermaid, Aquamarine, back to her home. There are 3 problems the girls run into. The first is that they can't just take her out of the pool with everyone watching them, the club is closing so they have to get her out fast because construction workers are coming to rip down the place and Aquamarine is rude and selfish. She also refuses to leave the club without going on a date with Raymond. A boy who worked at the club.  But the not being i salt water is killing Aquamarine, she only has a week. If she doesn't get back to the ocean soon, she will turn to green dust. Hailey and Claire have to deal with all of this, and make the most of their last summer together because Claire was moving to Florida with her grandparents. 

 

The characters are Hailey, Claire, Aquamarine and Raymond. Hailey is a very daring character. The only thing she is affraid of is the future because can't control it. She hates the fact that Claire is moving and that her parents are divorced. Claire, is very shy, and hates the water. Both her parents died in a car accident. She is also a very good problem solver. Aquamarine, is a mermaid and has 6 older sisters. She is very rude and thinks only of herself. She also refuses to leave the Capri until she could go on a date with Raymond. That causes a lot of problems for Hailey and Claire. Raymond ran the snack shack at the Capri and all the girls loved him. Raymond was very nice to the girls and was almost like their older brother in a way. He looked out for them, and was their when Hailey and Claire needed help and not because his job required him to.

 This is one of my favorite books. I have read it 4 times. The movie and the book are very different. I think the book is better than the movie. Aquamarine herself acts very different than she did in the book. I liked all of the detail in the book and the characters. It was interesting to see how they changed from the beginning of the book to the end. Claire starts to become tougher and Aquamarine learns what it is like to be a friend. 

I compared this book to the movie. I was always pointing out things that didn't happen in the movie or the way the characters acted. The first thing I picked out when I was watching the movie after reading the book for a 3rd time was that in the book Claire is moving away, while in the movie Hailey is moving. Another thing was that Aquamarine was nicer in the movie and she could go on land. In the book, Aquamarine couldn't do that. When she got on land to go to that date with Raymond she started to become very sick. The date wasn't even 30 minutes. Thats how fast she reacted to being out of the water. 

Alice Hoffman was born in New York on March 16th, 1952. She has written sixteen novels, two short fiction stories and eight books for children and teens. Her first book was "Property Of". She wrote it when she was 21. She is living in New York and Boston. Four of her books have been turned into movies. They are "Aquamarine", "Practical Magic", "Independence Day" and "River King".