And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid, by Laura Kirkpatrick

And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid, by Laura Kirkpatrick

And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid came out in the UK in mid-2019, and is being released in the US in mid-June of this year. It’s being billed as “Louise Rennison meets Bad Mermaids,“ so I wanted to read it—because Louise Rennison—even though it’s about mermaids, which are traditionally not my thing, unless they’re murderous. (More on all that in a bit, I’m sure.)

It’s about almost-13-year-old Molly Seabrook, the second-to-youngest of the five Seabrook sisters:

Molly lived in a crooked old lighthouse with her four sisters, each more embarrassing than the last, and a mom who liked to feel the sea breeze on her bare skin. Try as she might to fix those things, Molly knew with heartrending certainty that she would never fit in.

On her thirteenth birthday, her mother and her older sisters take her to the beach, where she finds out—as you may have deduced from the title—that she’s a mermaid.

She is NOT PLEASED. As the quote above says, she already feels like she’ll never fit in at school. Strikes already against her: her mom’s penchant for nudism, the fact that the family owns and works in a fish & chip place, her weirdo sisters, and now she’s ALSO got to hide this whole mermaid thing from everyone INCLUDING her best friend, and it’s a LOT, etc., etc., etc.

It’s fine? It never reaches the heights of Louise Rennison’s books—I think it’s not as laugh-out-loud funny because it’s not as… I would say ‘biting’, though other readers would probably say ‘mean’—and for the most part it reads as a pretty by-the-numbers contemporary. She and her best friend are growing apart; she has an unrequited crush on a Popular Boy at school and a Nice Boy has an unrequited crush on her; there’s a Mean Girl who has it in for her; you know the drill.

Except, you know, she turns into a mermaid if she walks too close to even small bodies of water. Like puddles.

Which leads me to my Mermaid Issues.

I’ve read enough mermaid stories to have noticed that a weird commonality: a lot of these stories seem to lean on world building that can basically be boiled down to this: Human Stuff Punned Up with an Aquatic Theme. For instance, in this one, merfolk play a waterpolo-ish game called Clamdunk in which the refs wave yellow shells when players get penalties, etc. And when they transform, it’s complete with MAGIC SHIRTS, because apparently merfolk, like humans, are afraid of boobs? Because reasons?

This is definitely MY STUFF—I know some folks will think I’m being a boring humorless killjoy pedant—but that sort of world building just DOES NOT WORK FOR ME? It feels lazy and it makes no sense that mermaids—who have access to THE ENTIRE OCEAN—seem to have no culture of their own, that everything is based in and around human culture? (In this particular book, they have less access to the ocean because pollution, and the Seabrooks have access to books of Mermaid History, but we don’t really get anything but Clamdunk and the KEEP THE SECRET OR ELSE rule. And the shirts.)

Like I said, My Stuff.

It should be noted that I read a digital ARC, so changes to any and all of the quotes here might still be made. But it should also be noted that the copy I read couldn’t seem to decide whether it wanted me to think it was set in England or set in the United States? All of the characters refer to the family shop as a chip shop, for instance, but they also us American terms for governmental roles, etc.

I have mixed feelings about the Mean Girl storyline, because while it’s ENTIRELY understandable that Molly doesn’t like this other girl—she’s, you know, MEAN, plus Molly’s best friend is hanging out with her more and more—but her go-to mental insults aren’t about that so much. No, they’re almost always about her appearance:

Plus, she had already had lip fillers, even though she was only fourteen. Her eager-to-please stepdad knew a suspicious guy who didn’t ask for ID apparently. She looked like she’d gone mouth-first into a beehive during honey season.

Which is definitely resonant of Rennison, but either I have changed or the times have, because it feels grosser in 2020?

So, this was a C+ read for me overall, but it does have its strengths. The sibling dynamics are great, it’s casually queer-friendly (one of the sisters is involved with another girl; one of them is coded ace), and there are some great one-liners, like:

But Margot didn’t hear her, because she’d stuffed a raspberry in each ear to block out the impromptu history lesson.

And:

The pace was very hard to maintain on account of her lack of physical fitness, but her stubbornness prevailed.

Mermaid-wise, though, I’d love some recommendations? (If it helps, some mermaid stories that HAVE worked for me: Rise of the Jumbies, Jumbie God’s Revenge, and The Lure. (If you haven’t watched The Lure, OH MY GOD IT’S AMAZING.)