The Mermaid begins like most other mermaid tales. A creature from the sea is caught in a fisherman’s net. With one glance, the mermaid falls in love with him and decides to leave the ocean.

But her eyes had seen inside him the way that women’s eyes do, and his loneliness snaked into her, and she was sorry for it, for that loneliness caught her more surely than the net.” pg 4

Predictably, their life together goes well, until one day it doesn’t.

Then, one of P.T. Barnum’s right-hand men, Levi Lyman, comes seeking a real mermaid, or at least a woman with a reputation of being a mermaid, for the showman’s museum.

“What he’d caught in his net had been far more alien, a creature covered in silver scales all over, with webbing between its fingers and teeth much sharper than any human’s. pg 9

Barnum is cast as the villain of this tale, a grasping coin-counter with little regard for the feelings of people, let alone magical creatures like a mermaid: “Barnum privately thought that if the woman was really a mermaid — not likely, as Levi had said, but there was always hope — she wouldn’t be going anywhere. There wasn’t a chance in heaven or hell that Barnum would let something like that go once he had it.” pg 43

Coincidentally, the day before I picked up this book, I had the chance to watch “The Greatest Showman“, a musical film about P.T. Barnum’s life, museum, and the people he hired to fill its halls.

I enjoyed the music and choreography, but felt that a man as complex as P.T. Barnum couldn’t fairly be depicted in a 90-minute film. There was a darker side to Barnum’s story — the way he fleeced people out of their money with “humbugs” and, in a particular, his treatment of a woman named Joice Heth.

P.T. Barnum is a purveyor of wonders, a seller of miracles, a showman of the first order.” pg 58

In this book, Christina Henry doesn’t shy from these shadows in Barnum’s life, but I didn’t feel like he was a particularly scary antagonist.

I suppose the true struggle in The Mermaid could be Amelia’s difficulty in maintaining her mermaid nature in a human world. However, that story has been told before.

She meant to do the proper human thing, to behave the right way, but they were not as easy with each other as she’d thought they would be.” pg 153

Henry didn’t put a twist to this fantasy tale as she so successfully managed to do with Alice, her dark re-telling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I confess, I was rather disappointed.

I wanted a unique mermaid story. Instead, I got a fairly standard interpretation of a classic.

“I left because I wanted something I didn’t have, and once I loved Jack and lost him, I wasn’t the same as I was before. Love does that. It changes you in ways that can’t be undone.” pg 177.

The Mermaid is a charming little tale, for what it’s worth. Just don’t expect too much out of it. It’s not a humbug, but I wouldn’t call it a wonder of the world either.

Here are some of my other reviews of books by Christina Henry:

Lost Boy: The True Story of Captain Hook by Christina Henry

The Red Queen by Christina Henry

And thanks for reading!

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