Barnum, to procure if not a real mermaid, then someone who could convincingly be passed off as one. Always restless, searching for adventure and something she can’t quite explain, Amelia initially rebuffs Levi Lyman, the friend and lawyer sent by P.T. Then, Jack is lost at sea and Amelia spends a decade mourning for her lost love, hating her beloved ocean for taking him away from her, not wanting to return to her family where she has never been happy. It had a very well-suited dreamy, fairytale style that I missed in the rest of the book, which is more “business-like”. This story of Amelia and her fisherman, Jack, and the many happy years they spend together in his little cottage on top of a cove in the middle of nowhere, was my favourite part of the book. The moment she touches sand, she transforms into a human woman, though always disconcertingly different. But she returns, feeling a strange pull towards him, having seen into his heart and realised his loneliness. North on the coast of Maine, a mermaid gets caught in the net of a fisherman, who lets her go. These issues still concern modern society, in whatever way or form, and it made for interesting social and moral discussions. I read an interview with Christina Henry in SYFY where the author explained that she wanted to explore certain themes through the telling of this story – “grief and loss, greed and desire, and feeling alien in a human society.” These themes, along with others like agency, freedom and choice, especially that of a woman in those times, or of belief, faith, “otherness”, the different ways in which one can be “in a cage” whether physical or metaphorical, form much of the allure of the book.

In this book, Amelia (this is the human name she takes) is a real mermaid and ends up working for P.T. It, a desiccated monkey’s upper body with a fish tail sown to its torso, was claimed to be a skeleton of a mermaid and led on a publicity tour. Barnum’s Feejee (Fiji) Mermaid attraction presented in his American Museum of Natural History in New York City and Moses Kimball’s Boston Museum in the early 1840s. Initially, I was under the impression that it was a The Little Mermaid retelling, but a bit of research told me that it was loosely inspired by P.T.

Then, later in the summer, I found out that she had a new book out. I also immediately put library holds on her Alice duology which I’m excited to get to soon. I’d been disappointed by a few Peter Pan retellings as well as in need of some magic, however dark and broody. I read Lost Boy by Christina Henry two months ago and, honestly, it found me at the right time.

Christina henry the mermaid