Read This Book…

This young adult anthology has 14 stories about mermaids (or rather, merfolk because they aren’t all maids), and there is such a wide range of stories: sweet, creepy, hilarious, vengeful, enraging, exhilarating, heartbreaking, and more. The variety keeps it super interesting, and the pacing and organization of the stories flow really well.

There are some stories, like “We’ll Always Have June” by Julian Winters, that are contemporary, and the merfolk in this world aren’t known by humans, in general. Other stories, like Preeti Chhibber’s “The Dark Calls,” don’t even bother with humans. This story keeps us with the merfolk under the water and dares to imagine going even deeper. Kalynn Bayron’s “Return to the Sea” will definitely squeeze your heart in a few different ways when you read it. In this story, merfolk are not only known to humans, but they live among each other, work together, and go to school together. Of course, there are humans who love to appropriate merfolk culture without actually having an ounce of respect for them or for the ocean. Two specific stories, “The Deepwater Vandal” by Darcie Little Badger and “The First and Last Kiss” by Julie Murphy, reminded me why I love the short story format so much. Both stories in themselves are as fulfilling a read as reading an entire novel, and they just hit all the right notes.

Some of the stories are historical fantasy, and I appreciate that not all the stories take place in the United States. It’s so refreshing to have merfolk from various cultural backgrounds and also just merfolk as their own culture and not just a Hans Christian Anderson mermaid “but make them brown.” The characters in these stories have real depth (pun intended). There were also stories that made me laugh out loud, like Maggie Tokuda-Hall’s “Shark Week” and others that brought tears to my eyes.

I enjoyed the wide exploration of how the humans react to mermaids: awe, fear, disrespect, adoration, etc. I had so much fun reading this anthology, and I hope you do, too.