On the day the tiny heroine of Jayne Joso’s book turns seven, her mother Maud remarries. Esther never knew her own father, and she’s excited at the prospect of having one:

"This was her chance then, the chance to have one. Brilliant! And there was every possibility that it was going to be even more brilliant since the whole thing was all so new! Her thoughts ran on, each colliding with the one ahead, forcing out the ever more pleasing “father, daughter” story."

Her enthusiasm gives the game away. Because of course it turns out that the father she so wants, and who she is promptly instructed to call “Dad”, is fond of rules for others and not much else. Right at the bottom of his long list of hates—which includes “the Irish, the Scots, and people from Liverpool; anyone Asian, Oriental or Black, and anyone from the Middle East”—is, of course, Esther, whose birthday is promptly forgotten, and who is soon relegated from bridesmaid to burden after being sick on her dress. She is entrusted to two of the guests and taken to the seaside, the place that will become her only refuge.

This is the curtain-raiser to From Seven to the Sea, which describes a child’s attempt, over the course of one summer, to navigate novelty against a backdrop of breathtaking adult dysfunction. Esther must endure a new father who shows himself more and more to be unworthy of the description, but she must also make new friends and attend a new school, now bearing a new surname which, somewhat predictably, presents problems more or less right away.

It’s at school that Esther encounters the fearsome Ms Butler, who is unreasonably annoyed that Esther fails to register her new name when it is called out. What follows is the first in a series of attempts on Ms Butler’s part to exclude Esther and sabotage her efforts to fit in and make friends. She plays to the worst instincts of a class of children for teasing and abuse, and this turns out to be her speciality. In one upsetting scene, Ms Butler, shuffling “on heavy hips,” has Esther submit herself to the open mockery of the class for the crime of failing to respond to her name in sufficiently fluent Welsh, which she does not speak. Like some Medieval wrongdoer consigned to the pillory, Esther is ordered to stand on her chair and endure the ridicule of her classmates.

"Esther couldn’t hold back anymore, and the tears that had risen from so deep inside fell with the full weight of her pain. She couldn’t speak. She still barely had the concept of another language, she had no energy to gather thoughts, or form words, or any words at all."

This is made more frustrating by the fact that Esther is bright and curious and initially finds Ms Butler’s authoritarian way rather comforting. “Ms Butler seemed to command respect and would undoubtedly take no prisoners should troublemakers be discovered,” thinks Esther; “Good.”

Circumstance conspires to test Esther’s sunshine spirit at every turn. Esther’s mother becomes little more than a maid to her insufferable new husband, “the man”, and an ineffective buffer against the bitterness he directs Esther’s way. At school, stuck with an unfortunate nickname, Esther’s talent is ignored, dismissed or made into a fault. And the friends she so desperately wants and strives to make do not materialise.

But Esther finds comfort in the sea. It seems to promise romance and adventure, and down by the harbour there’s a buzz and bustle which Esther likes. In the shape of kindly inveterate seaman Pete (who wears a “nice navy blue hat, like a real true fisherman”) she finds something of the father-figure she has been denied by her mother’s choice in husbands. “Down the harbour [Esther] felt her heart rate coming back into rhythm with the rest of her body, she felt more real, more ordinary, more alive.” It’s here, free from the caprice and intolerance of the adults in her life, to which Esther escapes when school finally becomes too much to bear.

Joso’s is, take it all in all, a charming story. It’s lacking somewhat in an engaging or driving plot, but is held together well enough by the well-wrought character of Esther and Joso’s remarkable talent for rendering her inner life believably. The degree to which you enjoy From Seven to the Sea will hinge on your interest in this, its central character, whose optimism and lack of guile remind the adults reading it of the wisdom of children. And it might also put you in mind of Freud, who once said that there is a distressing contrast between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.