Review: Lyrical and touching
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 24, 2013
You've read the story, but you haven't read it like this.I was hooked from the first paragraph.  The narrator's voice is compelling, and she tells her story with a poetic simplicity.  Melur is a Mer, an aquatic mammal who dreams of somehow escaping her pod and their way of life.  Her quest takes her to the dry land and into the arms of a human man, where she learns that getting everything that you think you want can come with a price that is too high to be endured.Yes, it is a retelling of Hans Christian Anderson's "The Little Mermaid", but Thomson's Melur is a unique character, at once romantic and savage.  Her struggles to understand the human world and their strange creations, her desire for something more than life in the sea can offer, and above all her fierce, naive love for the human that she rescued from drowning blend into a voice that will haunt the reader.The story is told in the first person, addressed to her human lover.  This gives it an intimacy that draws the reader into her world.  It is a powerful story, and I'll admit that I cried at the end.Highly recommended.