Kids into books - The Silent One

This week's title: The Silent One

Author: Joy Cowley

Publisher: Penguin Books, $9.95

Illustrator: Colin Edgerley

Age group: 8-13 years


But to Jonasi it seemed that the difference was with his mouth rather than his ears. He often watched as people moved their lips and jaws. They weren't eating. They were making mouth-signs to each other. He'd tried to do the same, but no one took any notice of him. Yet his reflection in the lagoon showed him a mouth that was the same as theirs.

The village could be a hostile Place. Jonasi thought that if only he could breathe like a fish, then he would never go back to the land. It would be so easy to slide under the surface and for ever live in a clear, deep pool between the two banks of coral. He smiled at the small things beneath his raft, as though they were his family, fish like showers of blue sparks, fish as flat as yellow leaves, leather fish with purple snouts, black and white striped sea snakes with golden eyes, sea horses, parrot fish - he knew them all as well as he knew Samu and Aesake.

The sea was calm today, rising and falling gently as though it were breathing in an untroubled sleep. Beyond the reef there was deep water marked by a line of white breakers. He paddled toward it.

The pools out here were deeper, so deep in places that the sun barely touched the bottom and the coral grew like giant trees. Jonasi saw a barracuda, brown and yellow and as thick as his thigh, hiding under a coral plate.