This is a book in which a girl is bullied and ultimately decides that she is comfortable and proud of herself as she is and stands up (or swims up) proudly before her bully. Emily and Shona wrestle with what is owed to a friend and with what their friendship means to each other. Emily finds a friend outside of school in Shona, a mermaid who likewise feels isolated from her classmates, who resent the teacher’s appreciation of Shona that Shona wins through her dedication to her classes. Emily has just started at a new school, Brightport High (she’s in Year Seven, approximately America’s 6 th grade), but she has been struggling to make friends, one of the more influential girls at the school leading others away from Emily because Emily accidentally got Mandy in trouble with her parents. This is a story about friendship and finding friends and the promises of friendship. I read this at first as a metaphor for interracial marriages, but its lessons could just as easily be applied to homosexual marriages (as I write this, the US Supreme Court is hearing arguments for and against allowing employment discriminating based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity) in the story, of course, it is a merperson and a human SPOILER ALERT (in this case, a woman and a merman, twisting Hans Christian Anderson’s “Little Mermaid” tale type). This was a call against making non-traditional marriages illegal. I don’t hardly remember any mention of school-aged boys, human or merperson. Romance is a thing in this first novel left to the adults, which was refreshing. This was a story of the power of love: familial, romantic, and platonic. This was a good mystery, which I failed to solve entirely (I did solve pieces of it). I didn’t find any available copies of the printed book at my local libraries, but I came home with a copy of the audiobook, read by the appropriately named Finty Williams. I had always dismissed this book and this series as too fluffy to try, one of those that I would find too juvenile to be enjoyable, being well past the age of Kessler’s intended audience-or too girly, too concerned with the little dramas of middle school and flirtation, but a recent event for work sent me scurrying to quickly read it to be prepared to lead a discussion.
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