Emma Tupper's Diary

Comedy of manners? ecological allegory? adventure? farce? the disparities don't reconcile. Dickinson starts with a houseful of savvy Scots and sets them to launching a juvenile hoax - disguising the family submarine (Grandfather McAndrews was an inventor) as a Loch monster. . . . It's hard to believe that Fiona and Andy who are 18 and 22 have nothing better to do, and the motives Dickinson supplies are unbecomingly flimsy: Finn incorrectly assumes that "the feud" (really old-fashioned sibling rivalry, over-reacted-to) between Andy and Roddy, 14, will subside if they collaborate on rebuilding Anna - short for Anna Di Ommany (anthropomorphic for Anadyomene [Greek for 'coming up from the waves']);free association is a sort of parlor game chez the McAndrews - but back to Andy, who hopes a film of the pseudo-monster in action will bring the TV people up and of course backfire later, thereby impressing (it's not quite clear how) one Gabriella, a production assistant who once put him down. It was (distant) Cousin Emma, from Botswana by way of England and boarding school, who first suggested the project, but she'd meant it as some kind of commercial enterprise to revive the not-at-all-to-be-pitied Clan finances, being very much the rational type. Charmed by Finn's graceful blend of earthiness and fantasy, dazzled by the improbably vague but beautiful Poop Newcomb who either takes care or is taken care of, Emma hasn't much personality of her own (although she's a "good guesser," Roddy says, which means she can tune in to the family's irregular wavelengths); she has, however, got character enough to learn to operate Anna so that she can spoil the hoax in order to save the Loch's genuine lizard-like creatures from commercial destruction. . . . Clever in spots but in no wise the equal of the first or third volumes in Dickinson's recent trilogy, partly because it's paunchy (or flabby round the middle), but mostly because the signals cross incompatibly. (Kirkus Reviews)