The Mer-Child
A Legend for Children and Other Adults
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Love transcends all barriers in this modern fairy tale
When the Mer-Child learned the story of the Little Mermaid, he recognized it as the account of his mother and father, the beautiful mermaid and the human man for whom she sacrificed everything. But that love had left their offspring, the Mer-Child, stranded between worlds, as unwelcome in the realm of the sea as in the earth above. Never fitting in, he has been left to wander, searching for friends, his silvery tail fluttering mournfully in the waves.
One day he notices a little girl sitting on the beach. Her father must carry her to and from the shore each day because her legs are paralyzed. Her father is black, her mother white, and she is as much an outcast in both communities as the Mer-Child is in his own. Slowly, warily, they find kinship, both in their differences and in their similarities, and they form a bond that changes them forever. What each learns about the value of being different makes this modern-day fairy tale a new classic, with two memorable characters and an enduring message.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A well-known feminist writer and editor presents a sad but ultimately uplifting tale of two outcasts. The Mer-child, rejected by his people as the child of a sailor and a mermaid, meets the Little Girl, who is also rejected, not only because her mother is black and her father white, but because she is disabled. They form an intense and bittersweet friendship by the edge of the sea, and she grows up to become an ecologically concerned oceanographer. The tale invites comparison to Randall Jarrell's The Animal Family , but Morgan is no poet. Unlike Jarrell, she doesn't let the characters' interactions tell the story, and so drifts from the book's center--the well-handled friendship of the children--into clumsy and pedantic moralizing. Stylized drawings of sea life don't rescue this well-intentioned but flawed work. Ages 8-up.
