Customer Reviews

Emma Tupper's Diary

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I have read Emma Tupper's Diary 50 times, as a child and adult. Adventure, mystery, interpersonal relationships, wry humour, and the most stunning setting in the lochs of Scotland. I wanted to believe that plesiosaurs really had survived the Ice Age and were living in a loch in the Highlands, as the premise the book sets out for this is so convincing. This is an intelligent, entertaining book and I am sure you will want to reread it too.

I set about to read this book solely on the basis of the title, carrying my own surname, curious whether there was any authentic reference to our family in it. Turned out the name was fictitious, as is the whole story, but it was a fun read anyhow--on an adolescent level.

The surname Tupper was an accident. Emma's mother is the heir apparent to the ancient McAndrew estate on the shore of a remote Scottish loch. The McAndrew clan are a wacky and contentious bunch descending from relative wealth and status into poverty and obscurity. Emma goes there on vacation from a boarding school in Africa and gets involved in a scheme to resurrect grandpa's submarine and use it to fool a TV broadcaster into thinking it was a loch monster like Nessie. Turns out they stumble into a real plesiosaur nesting area and get attacked by real angry plesiosaurs and narrowly escape with their lives.

The story descends a little too often into pre-adolescent humor, the characters are all exaggerated, some to cartoonish cutouts, and at the end it gets rather too preachy about environmentalism. But if you can endure those faults, it is worth to spend some hours on--just for fun.