Aquamarine (original 2001; edition 2002)

A cute book about friendship and magic. We all love the idea of mermaids and true love. This book is a great combination of them to draw the reader in. ( )

This book will be a good book for young girls to read. It is about two girls who are best friends and after the summer is over one is moving away and their favorite country club is closing down. One day a big storm comes through and brings a mermaid into the pool, the girls find her and help her get back to ocean where she belongs. But there is a catch, the mermaid loves the cute boy that works the lunch counter. She has to have a date with him before she leaves. The girls arrange it and put her safely back in the ocean. This would be a good summer reading book for third through fifth grades. ( )

This book was really interesting! I really liked that it did'nt drag out the story, and did'nt have pointless parts. I think the message is to always hepl a person out if they need it. I think this would be a good book for anyone! ( )

Aquamarine is a coming of age, magical tale about two 12 year old best friends about to be parted at the summer’s end. Claire and Hailey have lived next door one another all their lives. Claire’s family is about to move away to Florida at the end of the summer. The two girls hang out at Capri Beach Club, a neglected and shabby place about to bulldozed at the end of the summer.

Despite the girls’ fear of change, the clock is ticking and summer is rapidly coming to an end. Then one morning, after a particularly harsh storm, they find a mermaid named Aquamarine in the bottom of the Capri Beach Club’s pool . She is grouchy from being trapped in the pool, but refuses to leave after laying eyes on Raymond, the handsome boy working the food stand. The girls concoct a scheme to give Aquamarine one magical evening with Raymond (while still keeping her true identity a secret) before they safely return her to the sea.

Aquamarine is a coming of age, magical tale about two 12 year old best friends about to be parted at the summer’s end. Claire and Hailey have lived next door one another all their lives. Claire’s family is about to move away to Florida at the end of the summer. The two girls hang out at Capri Beach Club, a neglected and shabby place about to bulldozed at the end of the summer.



Despite the girls’ fear of change, the clock is ticking and summer is rapidly coming to an end. Then one morning, after a particularly harsh storm, they find a mermaid named Aquamarine in the bottom of the Capri Beach Club’s pool . She is grouchy from being trapped in the pool, but refuses to leave after laying eyes on Raymond, the handsome boy working the food stand. The girls concoct a scheme to give Aquamarine one magical evening with Raymond (while still keeping her true identity a secret) before they safely return her to the sea.



This is a quick, sweet story and delightful read. The reader will fall in love with the Hailey and Claire’s friendship bond. Anyone who has lost a best friend as a child will identify with their heartache and smile at their attempts to assist Aquamarine. It’s a short novel, geared toward younger teens but still can be enjoyed by adults. I enjoyed the underlying theme of adolescence being a magical time where friendships are true and bonds unbreakable. Aquamarine’s haughtiness and rebellion against her father added a comic twist to the story as well.

sorry for the cover which i absolutely dispise. i like the original cover which i own. i hate it when they redo books and add the movie cover. anyways this is a great book about two girls who want to save there final summer together, but end up saving a mermaid instead! join them on their crazy quest for love, fun, and all around awesomeness! ( )

this is a good book but it is nothing like the movie. ( )

It's one of Alice Hoffman's books for young adults but I didn't expect it to be so short. I'd read Green Angel which is another of her young adult books but it was still almost an inch thick. This one was barely 1/4 inch thick. It took me 23 minutes to read.

It's the story of a mermaid named Aquamarine that gets thrown into a pool in the middle of a city thanks to a storm. The pool (and surrounding area) are being torn down at the end of the week but Aquamarine refused to go unless she can meet the guy who runs the place. What can the two girls who discovered her do to help?

It's like a spin-off on The Little Mermaid in that the mermaid falls in love with a human man but the rest of the story is different. It was a cute story that I'm sure girls ages 10-14 would love.
( )

I read Aquamarine after I saw the movie, so I was a bit disapointed. It was a little bit younger then I exspected and was very short. Still, that didnt distract from the fact that this story really is adorable and its a lovley story about best friends sticking together even if they do live far apart. ( )

Young female readers willl particulary enjoy this novel because of Hoffman's portrayal of adolescent freindships. Hailey and Claire's friendhip is characterized as very intense and therefore, very fragile to life changing circumstances. The fear of an uncertain future is what most adolescents, and people in general will continually deal with throughout thier lifetime. However, how they manage to deal with these fears is clearly what will stand the test of time. Hoffman's very simplistic literary style definitely delivers a very profound message that all can relate to. ( )

This book is intended for pre-teen and teenaged girls but anyone with a romantic heart will enjoy it. It is about dreading change, facing change, and coping with change and at the same time it is about the need for change. Two best friends who have been together all their lives and seen each other through difficult changes in their family dynamics like death and divorce are facing another huge change but this time they'll have to face it separately. Claire is moving away and Hailey has to stay behind and to top it off the beach club where they've wiled away every summer has crumbled into decay and is being demolished. Their friend Raymond who is facing changes of his own and a naive little mermaid who demands change help the girls to ride the waves and do some growing in the process. There are nice little flourishes of magic and romance and melancholy throughout. It's a sweet story. ( )

ok. Usually the books are WAY better than the movies, but in this case, the movie was WAY better than the book. This book gives a really bad impression on the movie. It has like no plot, no detail just....... BLAH!! This is a short-read and I could not even lie saying I liked this book. I really hope Alice Hoffman writes better books. If it wasn't for the movie this book would be getting LOWER than a 2. I would have to agree with PrincezzRyn. Trash the book and watch the movie. ( )

it was so.....
not something i would usually like. I have only seen the film but really enjoyed it.

This book is a quick, easy, and enjoyable read. It is about two best friends, one of which is moving. They find a mermaid who brings them closer together but makes them realize that sometimes you just have to go where life takes you. Although this book was probably meant for a fourth or fifth grader, its message makes it applicable to all ages. It shows how love can conquer all and is the most important thing.
This book, like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pant was also made into a movie. I actually liked the movie better than the book because it had a better development of character. The movie characters had much more of a personality than the book characters and their personality added to the message of the book. They showed that its okay to be who you are even if you are not what other people would entitle "cool".
The strong message conveyed through this book makes this a timeless piece of literature.

To tell you the truth, I liked the movie a lot better even though they usually don't even compare. My friends and I really enjoyed the movie so I bought the book expecting it be even better. I am sad to say it just wasn't as good. It was really short and there wasn't much character depth. The book has sort of the same plot as the movie. There are two 12-year-old girls, Hailey and Claire, who are dreading the end of the summer because Claire is moving. Then they meet a 16-year-old mermaid named Aquamarine. She changes their summer and falls in love with the snack bar guy, Raymond, who is going off to college. Aquamarine won't leave until she gets what she wants like all stubborn mermaids. ( )

This book was not the best, i liked the movie a lot better. in the book, there is not much of a plot, and things just are not right. I love the movei, though, so i will give the book 3 1/2 stars. I would have rated the movie a 5... and the book a 2... so that makes sense giving it a 3 1/2 ( )

Best friends Hailey and Claire are twelve years old and lamenting the fact that their favorite summer hang-out, the near-deserted Capri Beach Club, is about to be closed forever. More than that, they’re both dreading the end of summer when Claire will be moving away. Then one day they find a feisty mermaid named Aquamarine living in the Capri’s swimming pool.

Welcome to Aquamarine, Alice Hoffman’s short (all-too-short) novel—her first written for young teens. Though Hoffman has previously written a couple of children’s books, her novels have been mainly for adults (Practical Magic, The River King, Here on Earth and others). Still, there’s always been a little bit of pixie dust sprinkled on most of the pages. In interviews, Hoffman has said she uses fairy tales as her models and is more interested in creating alternate universes, not everyday reality.

There’s a little of the everyday in Hailey and Claire’s world, but there’s also plenty of Hans Christian Andersen. Hoffman’s style skips along light as a beach ball blown by the wind. At heart, however, the two girls are facing some very serious fears—the end of the Capri and the end of their lifelong friendship:

Once the bulldozers started in on the wooden cabanas, once they destroyed the pool and the patio and the snack bar, wasn’t it possible that Claire would no longer remember summers spent at the Capri with her parents?…When the Capri was gone, maybe they would forget each other as well. They’d grow up and be just like all those other people who didn’t know what it meant to have your best friend living right next door, grown-ups who had no idea of what it was like to have someone understand you so well they could tell what you were thinking before you even spoke aloud.

Then, in the last days of August, the magic happens late one night:

The wind was so strong, it knocked on the rooftops and rattled the stars up above. Both Hailey and Claire had the feeling that something was about to happen, in spite of how much they wanted their lives to remain the same.

Not a chance of that happening after they find a mermaid in the bottom of the pool, stranded there by the big storm.

Her hair was pale and silvery and her nails were a shimmering blue. Between each finger there was a thin webbing, of the sort you might find on a newborn seal or a duck.

“What are you two staring at?â€? the mermaid said, when she turned and saw the girls gaping.

Her voice was as cool and fresh as bubbles rising from the ocean. She was as beautiful as a pearl, with a faint turquoise tinge to her skin and eyes so blue they were the exact same color as the deepest sea. But her watery beauty didn’t mean the mermaid knew her manners.

Despite the fact that Aquamarine is “much ruder than most creatures you might find at sea,â€? the two girls decide to pull off one last adventure before their Summer of Friendship ends. They play matchmaker between Aquamarine and Raymond, the darkly handsome, happy-go-lucky snack bar attendant.

That’s all I’ll tell you of Aquamarine’s plot…but if you’ve been paying attention in your Romantic Movies 101 class, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how the whole thing turns out.

The trouble with Aquamarine is that it all “turns outâ€? much too quickly. Hoffman’s word choice and sentence composition are pitch-perfect and lyric, but while there’s a density of language, there’s a sparsity of pages (98 of them, to be exact). Add to this the fact that the publisher, Scholastic, designed the volume with plenty of white space on the pages and you’ve got a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reading experience. I read my copy while I was dining alone at a Mexican restaurant; I finished the book before I reached the bottom of my first helping of chips and salsa. And I’m a fast eater.

Sadly, the brevity of Aquamarine works against it. We’re never allowed to get close to any of the characters: Raymond remains a stereotype cabana boy character, Aquamarine isn’t quirky enough and Claire and Hailey are little more than the kind of sweetly pining young girls you’d find in a Mary Kate and Ashley video. I wanted more, more, more and by the time I polished off the last tortilla chip, I was starting to wonder if Hoffman didn’t have extra flesh to drape on this bare-bones book but, for some reason, held off because she was afraid young readers wouldn’t endure a volume they’d have to hold with two hands.

Well, all I can say is, when I was a boy (a sweetly pining young boy), I would read thick-n-chunky books like A Wrinkle in Time, The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Little House in the Big Woods. I never once let my eyes slip off the page or had to stifle a yawn. There’s nothing wrong with a brick-sized children’s book. You’d be surprised how many marvelous and multi-colored worlds can be hidden inside bricks at the library.

But maybe things are different these days. After all, Mrs. Hoffman has to compete with the Disney Channel’s dumbed-down hyperkinetic entertainments, the sugar-coated blare of Britney Spears and the cordless-phone conversations with friends breathlessly giggling about the oh-so-cute boy in the third row of Mrs. Harmon’s class (hey, I’m the father of a teenage girl; I speak from experience). Against this synthetic culture-noise, I guess long books about mermaids and cabana boys don’t stand a chance.

So what kind of person reads Aquamarine? You’d be surprised.

For the past three weeks, the book sat next to my computer in the basement, waiting for me to scratch out a review. One day last week, while he was searching the Internet for anime art, my oldest son—a 16-year-old who normally disdains All Things Gooey and Romantic—picked up Aquamarine and, like me, read it in one sitting.

After I had my eyebrows surgically removed from my hairline, I asked him what he thought of it. “I liked it a lot, but I’m with you, Dad,â€? he said. “I think it was way too short. I would have liked to see more of the romantic relationship developed between the mermaid and the snack bar guy.â€?

High praise indeed, coming from a teenager who flees in terror whenever a Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks movie comes on. ( )

Synopsis: A juvenile book about two best friends Hailey and Claire, who discover a mermaid in their beach club's pool. The mermaid, Aquamarine, wants a date with Raymond the snack bar guy. The girls set this up, only if Aquamarine will go back into the ocean so she doesn't die. The girls want this summer at the Capri Beach Club to be the best, as Claire is moving and The Capri is closing when the summer ends.

Pros & Cons: It is not the most outstanding book for this genre, the writing is sos-so, and not much character depth. But, it is a cute book for the 8-10 year old range. It has been on my YA/Kids book list for awhile ( )