By: Carolyn Turgeon
Category: Fiction (Maybe slightly fantasy-ish)
Stars: **
"In Turgeon's surprisingly dark retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, two women pine for the affections of a prince: mermaid Lenia, who pulls Prince Christopher from the sea, and Margrethe, the princess of the rival kingdom, who witnesses the rescue from the convent where she hides from the war raging between their two kingdoms. Lenia, who falls instantly in love with the prince, sacrifices the sea, her voice, and her health to be with him on dry land. Meanwhile, Margrethe believes that marrying the prince would unite their kingdoms, but when she arrives to arrange it, she finds him already enraptured with Lenia. While he remains unaware that the girl he loves is also the mermaid who saved him, Margrethe recognizes her rival immediately and puts into motion a plan to send the ailing mermaid back to the sea and save her own ravaged kingdom."
I've always liked the original story of the Little Mermaid (the Disney version's good, too), where the Mermaid offers up her tongue to become a human, where every step is like walking on the edge of blades, and where she can't bring herself to kill the prince and allows herself to die and become sea foam. So I was kind of excited to read this book, since it was supposed to be a 'surprisingly dark retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid.'
Well, it's not. It's not dark, it's not really all that intriguing and I couldn't for the life of me figure out why the Prince was so alluring (he has maybe 30 lines in the whole book and they make him out to be a womanizing pig). The Princess was whiny and boring, while the Mermaid was very one dimensional.
It takes place on what I can only assume is Earth (they talk about the Odyssey, Latin, Greek and Christ), though it's only referrered to as 'The North' and 'The South.' The Princess' father, the Northern King, hates the Southern king (for reasons that aren't defined) and wants to go to war with them...for no reason that I could tell.
The author also needs an editor-the Princess' best friend is first seen as a girl that the Princess meets while in hiding at a convent (when she's 18), and then, in the next chapter from her POV, the author writes that the best-friend has been the Princess' best friend since they were little girls together. Huh?
(Spoiler: The ending is different too, and the Mermaid doesn't become sea foam, but turns back into a Mermaid through a scene that confused me-something about the Princess' blood being the same of the Prince's because they've consummated their marriage. The Mermaid also gives birth to a human daughter whose raised by her father the Prince and the Princess. I didn't like the ending).
I gave it two stars, though, because I liked the underwater scenes with the Mermaid's sisters-they were kind of interesting, and I could picture the Merpeople's kingdom.
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