American Mermaid
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Broke English teacher Penelope Schleeman is as surprised as anyone when her feminist novel American Mermaid becomes a bestseller. Lured by the promise of a big payday, she quits teaching and moves to LA to turn the novel into an action flick with the help of some studio hacks. But as she’s pressured to change her main character from a fierce, androgynous eco-warrior to a teen sex object in a clamshell bra, strange things start to happen. Threats appear in the screenplay; siren calls lure Penelope’s co-writers into danger. Is Penelope losing her mind, or has her mermaid come to life, enacting revenge for Hollywood’s violations?
American Mermaid follows a young woman braving the casual slights and cruel calculations of a ruthless industry town, where she discovers a beating heart in her own fiction, a mermaid who will fight to move between worlds without giving up her voice. A hilarious story about deep things, American Mermaid asks how far we’ll go to protect the parts of ourselves that are not for sale.
Julia Langbein spent her formative years doing sketch, stand-up and improv comedy in New York before getting her doctorate in art history. She is the author of a non-fiction book about comic art criticism and has since written about food, art and travel for Gourmet, Eater, Salon, Frieze and other publications. A native of Chicago, she lives outside of Paris with her family.
‘I was hooked from the first page. American Mermaid is brilliantly sharp, funny, and thought-provoking, the gripping story of a woman trying to find her way in our chaotic world.’ Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe
'Every time I picked up this book I both laughed out loud and sighed in admiration. Deeply hilarious, delightfully strange, intricately constructed and remarkably satisfying, American Mermaid is sensational.' Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir
‘A salty, sleek and scheming satire, American Mermaid considers dangerous and alluring myths surrounding creative control, compromise and complicity. Told with a caricaturist’s energy and dynamism, Langbein’s layered narratives gleefully expose Hollywood’s ritualized humiliations. Full of skewering, mischievous precision, it is a glittering, baited hook of a novel.’ Eley Williams, author of The Liar's Dictionary
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Langbein's amusing if overstuffed debut novel (after the art book Laugh Lines) splices together the stories of a mermaid confined to land and a novelist trying to make it in Hollywood. Penelope Schleeman moves from Connecticut to L.A. to cowrite the screenplay for her novel, also called American Mermaid, a job she shares with two boorish pros who discard most of what makes the novel matter to her. She attends one drunken party after another, shooting rats at one and nearly drowning at another, while dispensing mordant one-liners about Tinsel Town (interns are "mechanically breezy"; her Century City high-rise is a "fifty-shelved glass coffin"). Her story is interlaced with long chapters from her novel, a feminist thriller in which asexual mermaid Sylvia Granger uses a wheelchair after her tail has been split into two so her adoptive parents can conceal her identity. At 24, Sylvia tries to end her life by launching herself into the sea, but instead of dying, she discovers her mermaid powers, and proceeds to take revenge on her father. Though Sylvia's story mirrors that of Penny, who also holds a grudge against her wealthy father, the links between Hollywood satire and earnest sci-fi tale are generally weak. Still, the voice-driven narration makes Penelope a companionable protagonist. Though it doesn't all hang together, it has its charms.