UNDER THE FOUNTAIN

I wanted to share with you an interesting book I happened to come across recently. It’s called Under the Fountain and it is written by Kathy Lovell and charmingly illustrated by Jane Meech. Essentially it is the story of two boys, Jake and George, who discover under the fountain in their local swimming pool a secret passage to the a sea cave where they meet two seals. Later in the story they are able to rescue the seals and save their lives. There is also a second plot that describes Jake’s treatment for leukaemia.

Why did it capture my imagination? Well for two reasons, basically it is a page turner; once I started I wanted to know what happens to the characters. Secondly, in a past life I was a social worker, and books like this are immeasurably useful for helping children make sense of their illness and the treatment process. When I was working for Social Services it was almost impossible to find books that related to the situations people found themselves in, and a book like this is very welcome.

Kathy has a blog: http://underthefountain.blogspot.com/ where you can follow her endeavours to have this book taken up by a major publisher.

I must just say a word about the illustrations, I think that Jane Meech has captured both the children and the seals. The artwork is excellent, as I hope you can see from the examples on this post.

Under the Fountain is exclusively available from the website http://underthefountain.blogspot.com/.