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feisty_mermaid 's review for:
The Mermaid
by Christina Henry
This is now one of my favorite books and I can only hope to convey the brilliance and wonder of it with this review. The story itself is about a mermaid who is discovered by PT Barnum and joins his show. The interesting thing is that it is loosely based on his life and his hoax mermaid. The book actually includes many true stories of his life and career and includes many of the real life people that he surrounded himself with.
But more importantly, the mermaid! Amelia is a mystical creature of the sea who has wanderlust and is exploring the world far from her home. She is caught up in a fisherman's net and he frees her but they had a moment where their eyes locked and she can feel his sadness and loneliness and that creates a bond which brings her back to him. She lives with him until he dies in a remote Maine town where the people eventually accept her and protect her as one of their own. A drunken fisherman sees her transform one night and the story reaches PT Barnum who sends, Levi (his lawyer) up to find her. He finds madly in love with her and his yearning and longing for her is described so wistfully and so ethereally that I could feel it. Which leads me to another point.
The prose in this book is magnificent, magical, enchanting, and otherwordly. Christina Henry's writing style is exquisite and incredibly atmospheric. Ok back to the story.
Amelia (as the mermaid decides to be called) and PT Barnum have a lot of conflict because he perceives himself as owning her but she is a wild creature and can not owned. This book goes beyond beyond a fairytale in that it takes a deep and profound look at how tamed women are expected to be. While of course, the times were more restrictive, I still see a lot of Amelia's observations on how women are expected to behave and how they are supposed to take a backseat to their husbands to still be true today. Her observations on society and how incredibly oppressive and inauthentic it is resonated deeply with me. When Levi says that she was so mysterious that he thought he would never know her because she was like the ocean, she responds that the ocean, and her, weren't so mysterious, you just had to be willing to delve deep below the surface. So much symbolism and philosophical truths in this book! And beautifully stated. I swooned.
The main theme of this book for me was yearning. The current of longing runs through all of the story and the subplots and is romanticized but made me feel wistful. I was nostalgic for something I could not name.
Beautifully written and filled with so many incredible quotes and metaphors that left me in awe. I loved the history, the story, the characters, the descriptions, the philosphy, the themes of feminism, yearning, wanderlust, and society, and the writing style....I feel as though I've left this world and coming back makes me feel disjointed. Ah...this book...<3
But more importantly, the mermaid! Amelia is a mystical creature of the sea who has wanderlust and is exploring the world far from her home. She is caught up in a fisherman's net and he frees her but they had a moment where their eyes locked and she can feel his sadness and loneliness and that creates a bond which brings her back to him. She lives with him until he dies in a remote Maine town where the people eventually accept her and protect her as one of their own. A drunken fisherman sees her transform one night and the story reaches PT Barnum who sends, Levi (his lawyer) up to find her. He finds madly in love with her and his yearning and longing for her is described so wistfully and so ethereally that I could feel it. Which leads me to another point.
The prose in this book is magnificent, magical, enchanting, and otherwordly. Christina Henry's writing style is exquisite and incredibly atmospheric. Ok back to the story.
Amelia (as the mermaid decides to be called) and PT Barnum have a lot of conflict because he perceives himself as owning her but she is a wild creature and can not owned. This book goes beyond beyond a fairytale in that it takes a deep and profound look at how tamed women are expected to be. While of course, the times were more restrictive, I still see a lot of Amelia's observations on how women are expected to behave and how they are supposed to take a backseat to their husbands to still be true today. Her observations on society and how incredibly oppressive and inauthentic it is resonated deeply with me. When Levi says that she was so mysterious that he thought he would never know her because she was like the ocean, she responds that the ocean, and her, weren't so mysterious, you just had to be willing to delve deep below the surface. So much symbolism and philosophical truths in this book! And beautifully stated. I swooned.
The main theme of this book for me was yearning. The current of longing runs through all of the story and the subplots and is romanticized but made me feel wistful. I was nostalgic for something I could not name.
Beautifully written and filled with so many incredible quotes and metaphors that left me in awe. I loved the history, the story, the characters, the descriptions, the philosphy, the themes of feminism, yearning, wanderlust, and society, and the writing style....I feel as though I've left this world and coming back makes me feel disjointed. Ah...this book...<3