Review: The Mermaid

The Mermaid by Christina Henry
My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars

3.5 Stars

This is my first foray into Christina Henry's work. At first glance, The Mermaid reads like a cautionary tale, platformed off the opening of the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of a mermaid who sees a sailor and falls in love. While there is less sorrow than in the Andersen fairy tale, there is greater danger and in sharp contrast to the Christian ethos of Andersen's writing, we see the damage religion can cause.

In this story, Amelia is a mermaid separated from her people after she goes exploring. She meets Jack, a sailor, after being tangled in one of his fishing nets. Jack, kind soul that he is, releases her. She follows after him, after seeing a sadness in his eyes. After a painful exit from the ocean, she finds her magic allows her to shift to human form and she finds Jack in his cabin and stays with him. For decades. Though she regularly still swims with fins, she lives like a human woman and Jack's wife. When Jack dies the townspeople, long suspicious that unaging Amelia isn't a regular human, cover for the grieving widow, shielding her from gossip and burying any outsider tales that their widow was actually a mermaid. Enter the machinations of P.T. Barnum and his partner, Levi Lyman, with a plan to create a stir and make a fortune off of displaying a real live mermaid.

The most interesting aspect of this story is Amelia's status as not quite human and not quite animal (in the sense of being a "dumb" animal, as if there is such a thing.) Amelia is a smart, freedom-loving being, who, for reasons I never grew to understand, decides to go into the employ of P.T. Barnum, showing her true form to thousands of onlookers a day. She didn't need to and she doesn't really need any money to live. Her decision to leave Maine and travel to New York to forge some sort of new life puts her at no small risk. Both Levi Lyman and Barnum's wife Charity (once she's on board the mermaid train) genuinely fear for Amelia's safety and her rights. While the book has lots of interesting points to make about sentient beings, racism, (speciesism?) and religious extremism, the story itself, like any fairy tale, requires a fair amount of suspension of belief on the part of the reader. The thing I kept coming back to again and again is why would this mermaid put herself out there like this, agree to it, stick with it, etc? I found that aspect of the book tough going. I could quibble about other things like the jarring use of isolated vernacular, particularly the word humbug which is employed, in a nonstandard use for those who have read Dickens,* with an article ("a humbug"), throughout the book.

This was a pleasant diversion, giving the reader a pensive mermaid trying to find her way.


*"We must have humbug, we all like humbug, we couldn't get on without humbug." - Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens



I received a Digital Review Copy of this book from First To Read and Berkley Publishing, along with a paper ARC copy of the book from a Goodreads giveaway.

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