Pinky Aquafin and the Thing That Never Noticed Her
D. M. Giblin
Synopsis "Pinky Aquafin and the Thing That Never Noticed Her"
Something is wrong with the water in the west.It isn't a storm and it isn't a current. It is a flat dark band on the horizon that has been there since spring, and it is a mile closer than it was, and nobody in Aqua Haven can say what it is. They have a word for it. The word means we don't know.At the assembly, four hundred people wait for somebody to volunteer.Pinky is ten and a half. She is standing at the back. She did not mean to say anything.Seven of them go over the lip into water with no bottom: a narwhal who has to surface every twenty minutes, a seahorse who makes a chart of being lost, a lantern fish frightened of the dark, a shark nobody trusts, a mage who says plainly that she cannot help, and a man who volunteered because he had nothing left at home.Five come back.What they find out there is not a monster. It is older than that, and slower, and it is dying, and it has a garden on its back. Getting one cutting out of the ground takes nine hours and all six of them.It never notices they were there.A story about who you become when you choose the people you travel with, borrowing its shape from Jason and the Argonauts. Thirty-four chapters, thirty-four full-page illustrations, for readers 8-12.