The Mermaid

by Christina Henry

June 19, 2018 · Berkley

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The Mermaid is a lyrical, dream-like story about a mermaid who falls in love with a fisherman and, many decades later, agrees to perform in P.T. Barnum’s Museum in New York City. Although this is not a romance novel, there are two love stories in the book, and I enjoyed the differences between them. I also enjoyed the relationships between women and the use of different settings to create atmospheres of claustrophobia versus expansiveness.

The story begins by introducing a mermaid who is the rebellious one among her sisters. She is caught by a fisherman on the coast of New England. He lets her go, but she, determined to explore land, discovers that when she touches the ground she turns human. She and the fisherman (Jack) marry and she adopts the name “Amelia” as her human one.

Decades later, Amelia is a widow (mermaids either do not age, or age very slowly). At the urging of Barnum’s associate, Levi Lyman, Amelia agrees to appear in Barnum’s American Museum. She hopes to earn enough money to travel the world, but finds herself overwhelmed by a variety of things. These include following the customs expected of an American woman, and protecting her freedom and dignity from onlookers and from Barnum, who is eager to exploit her. She also struggles to befriend Barnum’s suspicious wife, Charity. As time passes, she also has to deal with her growing feelings towards Levi, and the differences between the relationship she had with the undemanding Jack and the relationship she could have with Levi, who has many more expectations about her behavior.

During her life with Jack, Amelia lived in a cottage outside a fishing village and didn’t mingle with her neighbors much. She was free to do as she pleased. In the city, she is pressured to meet the expectation of society. Amelia is often confused about human behavior in the city, but she’s not what I would call naive. She keeps having to remind Charity that she’s not the young girl she appears to be, and she’s completely solid about her boundaries.

Unlike Henry’s previous books Alice and Lost Boy, this book is not gory and has only one overtly violent moment. It has some darkness to it but ends happily. I loved its distinctively lyrical yet realistic and determined tone:

Amelia had carefully observed Charity Barnum over these weeks to see what was generally expected of women. All she’d found was that women spent a great deal of time saying they were pleased when they were not, smiling when they were not happy, and pretending their frustration and anger did not exist.

Jack never expected this of her. He never wanted her to pretend to have feelings she did not have, or to say something just to please him.

Having never troubled to do such things for her husband, she found the habit of being herself difficult to break.

In “The Little Mermaid” by Hans Christian Andersen, suffering silently is equated with love and virtue. In The Mermaid, Amelia says what she thinks, stands up for herself, and is able to have healthy romantic and platonic relationships not because she sacrifices herself but because she puts her self-respect first. Unlike Charity, who is always seen in her apartment, Amelia refuses to be permanently enclosed and she has the emotional and material resources to avoid such a fate. The book is full not only of explicit discussions of being trapped and/or owned by another, but of visual representations as well – Amelia’s clothes are confining, her celebrity status is confining, her tank is confining, but the ocean is expansive. She likes belonging WITH someone, not belonging TO them.

This is not historical fiction in a faithful form. Barnum did display a fake mummified mermaid (The Fiji Mermaid) in his museum, but he didn’t have a live exhibit of one, either fake or real. Barnum is portrayed one-dimensionally, as someone obsessed with money. The author, in her afterword, states that her Barnum is not intended to be a historically accurate character. This is also not a story that has any interest in what my biologist husband calls “mechanics.” There’s no explanation about how mermaid biology works. The reader simply accepts (or is expected to accept) that on land Amelia is completely human-shaped but in salt water this happens:

He couldn’t discern every detail, but it was apparent even from this distance that there wasn’t much of the human left about her. Those shiny fish scales covered her everywhere, not just her legs. Her jaw was longer, the shape of her face a little different, the nose flatter, the nostrils wider. She was altogether a different mermaid than the ones painted by dreamy-eyed artists.

Caveat with SPOILER:

The above caveat aside, the only reason I went with an “A-” instead of an A is that this is a very slow-paced book. It’s short, but at times I got, dare I say, a little bored. At the same time, I felt like that slow tone was part of the point of the story. From a young age, Amelia is always wanting to go out and do new things. When she meets Jack, she stays in the same place for decades. When she joins the Museum, her days involve being trapped in rooms, whether public or private. By making the reader sit with this feeling for a bit, the author helps the reader share Amelia’s desire to move on.

Overall I thought this was a lovely book and I enjoyed the way Amelia deals with various kinds of relationships. This would be equally lovely to read as summer comes to a close or during a rainy day.