Boy Underwater

By: Adam Baron

Narrated by: Rafe Spall

Length: 4 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's Summary

Selected as Waterstones Book of the Month.

Shortlisted for The Carnegie Award.

Boy Underwater is a heartbreaking story about family, friends and secrets. And it’s very, very funny.

Cymbeline (yes, really!) has never been swimming - not ever, not once - so he’s a bit nervous at the prospect of his first school swimming lesson ever. But how hard could it be? He’s Googled front crawl, and he’s found his dad’s old pair of trunks. He’s totally ready for this.

But he’s not ready for an accident at the pool to reveal a family mystery that turns his life completely upside down. Only Cym and his friends can solve it because, as usual, the grown-ups aren’t telling them anything.

For the answers you really need, sometimes you have to go deep....

©2018 Adam Baron (P)2018 HarperCollins Publishers Limited

Critic Reviews

"An absolute corker of a tale, whose delicate themes – mental health, missing loved ones – are handled with fluid grace." (Observer)

"This poignant novel is about love and loss, but, told from the viewpoint of a child too young to grasp all that grown-ups do, it is also funny. With evocative monochrome illustrations, it bears you up as soon as you plunge in." (Sunday Times Children’s Book of the Week)

"Involving and wryly funny, full of tenderness, eccentricity and intriguing meditations on the function of art, this story of grief, depression and the different facets of identity is well-served by Benji Davies’s thoughtful illustrations." (Guardian)

not good

too boring and the kid doesn't really go in the water so I ti should be call the boys mom underwater

excellent

this audiobook is very witty, the performance is excellent and the story is touching. Would not recommend to below 11 year olds as it has mentions of puberty, penises and vaginas

A really moving, thoughtful story

Aimed at more mature upper key stage 2 readers, it deals cleverly with difficult issues such mental health and (spoiler alert) death. I really enjoyed this well-woven tale.

Boy under water

Most depressing story we as a family have ever listened to! It was promised to be full of humour in the blurb but instead it was full of doom and gloom. The title Boy under water made us think it would be a bit mysterious and imaginative but it has a very dark, miserable connection to the story. The thing is it starts off quite nice so you get drawn in however it goes down hill, especially from a child’s point of view, but you need to keep trudging through it cos you are desperate to find out if it has a happy ending to make up for the total waste of time that you will never get back! It has a rubbish ending by the way so we do not recommend it! Sorry!

Water

Ok let's get started so boy 👦 underwater🌅 is a good 👍 book well it starts of bad then good then bad then good... I hope you listen 🎶\read this book.thanks for reading 📚 this review. Bye 🌊





















Ps get this book

Great book

This book was great,

it keeps me thinking and guessing,

I definitely recommend this book

AMAZING LOVE 💓 IT SO Much IT WAS GREAT BEST BOOK Ever 🥰😍

You can ad more stuff sim does over all it is AMAZING 😉🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩👍👌✌🏼so so good yay

Amazing

This book was so moving at was a heart pounding book I would definitely recommend this book

Loved it

Long and entertaining

I loved it nothing bad about it

I recommend this book to everyone

Very emotional and some great humour.

I found this book hard going in the middle and wasn’t sure my son would stick with it. There is a lot of loss / events the boy has to work through. But the end really does pull it around to be a powerful piece of writing that is put across so well.
It has some great humour and wonderfully observed relationships.

Fantastic story

Fantastic story and well read. I really enjoyed it. I hope there's another one.. Cameron age 10