Kathleen has always been dramatic. She suffers from the bizarre malady of experiencing stabbing pain in her feet. On her sixteenth birthday, she woke screaming from the sensation that her tongue had been cut out. No doctor can find a medical explanation for her pain, and even the most powerful drugs have proven useless. Only the touch of seawater can ease her pain, and just temporarily at that.
Now Kathleen is a twenty-five-year-old opera student in Boston and shows immense promise as a soprano. Her girlfriend Harry, a mezzo in the same program, worries endlessly about Kathleen's phantom pain and obsession with the sea. Kathleen's mother and grandmother both committed suicide as young women, and Harry worries they suffered from the same symptoms. When Kathleen suffers yet another dangerous breakdown, Harry convinces Kathleen to visit her hometown in Ireland to learn more about her family history. In Ireland, they discover that the mystery—and the tragedy—of Kathleen’s family history is far older and stranger than they could have imagined. Kathleen’s fate seems sealed, and the only way out is a terrible choice between a mermaid’s two sirens—the sea, and her lover. But both choices mean death…
I love The Little Mermaid. It's one of my favourite Disney movies, and the original fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson, while not exactly subtle in its preachiness, remains one of the most dark and haunting fairy tales I've read with a very grim ending. Imagine my excitement when I found that there was a modern retelling that sort of combines the two (but mostly draws from Hans Christian Anderson's original tale). While it was not as good as I hoping it would be going in, I still found many merits in this book.
Ann Claycomb is a very good writer. I found her writing style to be original and unique, and it kept pulling me in for more to see what was going to happen next. She really brings something new to the table with this retelling and it was cool that she added the generational plotline to the book. I really liked how in between each chapter there was a mini-chapter from the mermaids' perspectives, which added another layer to the book. That being said, I found that the story dragged a little bit in places, especially in the first half of the novel before Kathleen and Harry go to Ireland and Kathleen starts to realize what is really going on. I found myself enjoying the second half of the novel more so than the first half of the novel once everything starts to come to fruition. I liked how Claycomb set up Kathleen as a character and incorporated the main fairy tale into Kathleen's mystery malady. While it did seem a bit plot device-y here and there, overall it worked well, and fit in with the overall magical realism that Claycomb had going on in this book.
I didn't find many of the characters to be that relatable or likeable. I would have liked to see more of the minor characters such as Tom, who is in the same program as Kathleen and Harry, or Tae, Robin's partner. Tom especially didn't really amount to anything once everything came to a conclusion, besides being one of Kathleen's confidantes and friends. This book has the same character narrative structure that Indelible had, with three focal characters. Two characters (Harry and Kathleen) took first person narrative, while one character (Robin, Kathleen's father) had a third-person narrative. I feel like it would have been more interesting and I would have been able to relate to the characters a bit more if it was one narrative in the third person, or if it was told entirely from one of the mermaids' point of view. These characters were not totally unrelatable, but I feel like they could have been more relatable too.
All in all, I would say that The Mermaid's Daughter is a good, but not great book overall. For the most part it was an intriguing story that picked up in the second half. While the characters were not especially likeable (but not unlikeable), the writing style was really good, and there were many additions and connections that Claycomb made, which added to the book overall. I'm going to give The Mermaid's Daughter a 3.5/5. I liked it, didn't love it, but I will probably read it again in the future.
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