Mermaid Moon

From the author of the Michael L. Printz Honor Book The Kingdom of Little Wounds comes an original fairy tale of belonging, sacrifice, choice, hope, magic and mortality.
This is just a children’s tale; would you wreck your ship for it?
Would you drown for a mere mother’s story?

Sanna is a mermaid – except her mother was landish, not seavish. The undersea witch who delivered her cast a spell that made her people, and her mother, forget her birth. Sanna longs to find her mother so much that she apprentices herself to the witch, learns the magic of making and unmaking, and fashions herself a pair of legs to go ashore on the Thirty-Seven Dark Islands, the nearest anyone can remember to where they left her mother. There, Sanna stumbles into a wall of white roses and a community desperate for a miracle – and into a baroness who would do anything to live for ever.

“"Susann Cokal's latest miracle, Mermaid Moon, springs from the tides where Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid once swam -- and walked to land. But she delivers something even more rich and strange, and a mermaid heroine who will swim away with your heart." -- Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked and Egg & Spoon”

Juxtaposed against the patriarchal culture wherein Thyrla has amassed and maintained power (one in which rape and infanticide are common), Cokal (The Kingdom of Little Wounds) creates a well-developed matriarchal mermaid mythology in which women couple, bonded by love and respect, and men are largely unnecessary. Through several voices and richly detailed prose, these markedly different worlds overlap and diverge to impart a nuanced exploration of power, family, faith, and love.
—Publishers Weekly

Thyrla, however, is a villain on par with Maleficent, cool, calculating, and so invested in power that she’s willingly sacrificed nearly her entire family—including children she specifically bore to kill—to keep her hold on the island and her youth. It’s the revelation of her love for her son that makes her the most complicated, if not sympathetic, character here, a far more interesting foil to pure-hearted Sanna...a haunting tale of love, betrayal, and family, on land and in sea.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

Lyrical, complex, and occasionally dark, with rich rewards for patient readers. Suggest this to thoughtful readers looking for strong females, unexpected twists, and a relatively happy ending. A good fit for fans of Margo Lanagan’s The Brides of Rollrock Island.
—School Library Journal

Mermaid Moon is an action-packed tale of parental abandonment, familial longing, treachery and dark magic with an appealingly determined heroine.
—BookPage

Mermaid Moon is a beautifully told, immersive novel that layers fairy-tale elements with more modern themes, allowing for a different experience with every reread.
—Shelf Awareness for Readers

This gorgeously designed, lushly written offering from Printz Honor winner Cokal (The Kingdom of Little Wounds, 2013), which builds upon the themes of The Little Mermaid, explores how femininity manifests in Sanna’s matriarchal society and outside of it. Told by a vast chorus of voices, this is a rich and stunning story that dives to startling depths, and literary teens will savor it.
—Booklist Online

Susann Cokal is the author of The Kingdom of Little Wounds, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book. Her work for adults includes novels, short stories and literary criticisms, and has been widely published in literary journals and the New York Times Book Review. An assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, she lives in Richmond, Virginia.

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