The Utterly Dark

Published on 28 December 2025 at 19:06

Utterly Dark and the Face of the Deep

🐚🌩️🌊🚣🏼‍♀️

Philip Reeve

★★★★★

At a glance

✍🏼 Author: Philip Reeve

📅 Release Date: 2nd September 2021

📚 Book type: Chapter, 288 pages

🌟 Reader level: Confident, 9+

Blurb

It was always at sundown they were seen. In that twilight hour, when the walls between the worlds grew thin, strange things might slip through the cracks. Sometimes then, so the stories went, enchanted islands would appear in the empty ocean to the west of Wildsea.

When Utterly Dark was a baby, she was washed up on the shores of the Autumn Isles and taken in by the Watcher of Wildsea. But everything changes when her guardian suddenly drowns. Now who will keep the Watch, and make sure Wildsea stays safe from the strange forces teeming in the deep ocean around them?

Review by Molly

I read this book because when I saw it in the class library, I loved the colours on the front cover and wanted to know more. I then looked at and read the blurb and loved it!

I really liked that this book is set near the sea on an island with a mythical feeling and the Dizzard people have horns or antlers! When I was reading it, I got so engrossed that I forgot that I was reading and that it wasn't real life!

The thing I thought was the best was the way the characters changed throughout. For example, Will Dark - he was bad and then good, then bad and then good again!

I would recommend this book to Year 5/6 and think you would love it if you like adventure, suspenseful books or Orphans of the Tide.