PART OF YOUR NIGHTMARE

A new middle-grade series featuring Disney stories’ scary elements opens with The Little Mermaid’s Ursula.

Shelly Anderson has struggled to make friends ever since she changed schools following her parents’ breakup. Even though she’s the eco-conscious daughter of an aquarium owner, the spineless Shelly allows her new, popular-clique friends to peer-pressure her into tossing a disposable coffee cup into the ocean. After littering, she’s stalked by sea witch Ursula, who offers a deal: She’ll make Shelly a fast swimmer in exchange for a favor to be named later. Of course, there’s something fishy with the deal: Shelly starts slowly transforming into a fish (first gills, then webbing between her digits and scales); to reverse it, she must retrieve the old trident that’s in the aquarium for Ursula. The narrative’s insistence on telling over showing causes it to fail to capture any visceral sensory details needed for the body-horror storyline to succeed. Ironically, the most successful horror moment is the least logically connected to the magic at play (her brother’s dead goldfish appears in the school toilet to warn her off from the deal). The half-baked environmental storyline features after-school–special levels of heavy-handedness. The ending’s unhappy for Shelly, though there’s a touch of humor and her safety’s implied. Most characters lack descriptions; Shelly has olive skin, and one significant secondary character is coded Latinx.

Coasting on a popular villain isn’t enough to keep the watered-down story afloat.