It’s unclear what audience will appreciate this tale of a mermaid on land finding new life, love and loss.
A mermaid refuses to enchant a sailor to his death, and after being condemned to live among humans, eventually finds her redemptive purpose in life in this difficult-to-categorize picture book.
Reluctant to lure humans to their deaths—an activity required of mermaids—Mele finds herself banished from her ocean home, legs replacing her fish tail, after she rescues a sailor from his watery grave. Her first encounters with humans make the former mermaid wonder whether Kilgore, king of the Merfolk, was right “that all humans were evil and deserved to drown to death.” Then a kindly dressmaker takes Mele in, makes her an entire wardrobe, teaches her to cook and clean, adopts her and takes her on as dressmaking apprentice. Mele inherits the dressmaking shop after her adoptive mother’s death and after falling in love and marrying Jonah the fisherman. But in this morality tale, at odds with its picture book format, the author has something other than a happily-ever-after fairy tale in mind. Jonah drowns at sea because a “mermaid that day had serenaded the crew of the ship, crashing it and killing everyone onboard, including her poor husband.” (As part of King Kilgore’s punishment for her, Mele is “unable to warn anybody about the mermaids who enchant the sailors to their doom.”) When she puts aside her grief, Mele thinks about how she and her husband were unable to have children and how her adoptive mother so graciously took her in. Mele’s new mission: to find other mermaids who “didn’t want to sing sailors to their death” and let them know that there is good in the world. Mele’s journey, infused with a tone of compassion, is clear. The book’s target audience is less well-defined: The colorful, awkwardly one-dimensional drawings are deliberately rendered as if by a grade-schooler, while the language and themes of guilt and redemption skew considerably older.
It’s unclear what audience will appreciate this tale of a mermaid on land finding new life, love and loss.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500995430
Page Count: 44
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre.
Ice princess Lina must navigate family and school in this early chapter read.
The family picnic is today. This is not a typical gathering, since Lina’s maternal relatives are a royal family of Windtamers who have power over the weather and live in castles floating on clouds. Lina herself is mixed race, with black hair and a tan complexion like her Asian-presenting mother’s; her Groundling father appears to be a white human. While making a grand entrance at the castle of her grandfather, the North Wind, she fails to successfully ride a gust of wind and crashes in front of her entire family. This prompts her stern grandfather to ask that Lina move in with him so he can teach her to control her powers. Desperate to avoid this, Lina and her friend Claudia, who is black, get Lina accepted at the Hilltop Science and Arts Academy. Lina’s parents allow her to go as long as she does lessons with grandpa on Saturdays. However, fitting in at a Groundling school is rough, especially when your powers start freak winter storms! With the story unfurling in diary format, bright-pink–highlighted grayscale illustrations help move the plot along. There are slight gaps in the storytelling and the pacing is occasionally uneven, but Lina is full of spunk and promotes self-acceptance.
A jam-packed opener sure to satisfy lovers of the princess genre. (Fantasy. 5-8)Pub Date: June 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-35393-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
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