Mark's Reviews > Mermaid

This was a book I picked up as a result of browsing though other people's reviews and as I love the stories of Hans Christian Andersen I thought i would give it a go. (Note to self...delete your amazon account or move to a bigger house ). This book arrived yesterday and I read it last night. It took the original story and fleshed it out with back story of the three main characters. Sometimes this engorging with detail can cause adopted stories to flag but here I think it works quite well. The personalities are not particularly well drawn but atmospheres and backgrounds are well painted.

There is a simple device of moving back and forth chapter by chapter from the earthbound princess to the watery one and this serves to make powerful descriptive differences in a sometimes quite humourous way. I loved the rather gross way Lenia, the mermaid, gets rid of the taste of something foul from her mouth by simply snacking, as she glides along, from the smorgasbord of options swimming past her.

The story itself is well known but Turgeon ( I did wonder whether this was a 'stage name ' in its rhyming opportunity but maybe I am being too obscure )succeeds in re-telling and re-moulding the whole thing so as to make it move swiftly and yet uncertainly. The storyline is clear, the reader thinks, but the author throws in enough new details, i won't call them red herring for obvious reasons, that you are not sure of the outcome until the very end.

Having said that, I did find the ending a trifle underwhelming. I think it is because I like my fairy stories extreme with no compromise. Either, happy ever after or leaving me sobbing on the couch. This did neither so that is why, though I enjoyed it, it only ranks as a 3