FernFolio

Twelve year-old Emily Windsnap lives with her mother aboard The King of the Sea, an old sailboat tied up in a marina in the seaside town of Brightport.  Because of her mother’s fear of water, Emily has never so much as had a bath, and she has never learned to swim. But swimming lessons are mandatory at her new high school and so her mother reluctantly agrees that Emily will get into the pool.  Dressed in her new bathing suit, Emily makes her way to the pool deck and climbs into the shallow end.  

She finds, to her surprise and delight, that she feels completely at home in the water and that, without a single lesson, she knows how to swim.  However Emily’s pleasure is short-lived.  Within minutes she gets terrible cramps in her legs and has to be rescued by the swim instructor.  Though he urges her to get back into the pool when the cramps subside, Emily refuses because she has the overwhelming sensation that something strange will happen if she does.  

That night, after her mother is asleep, Emily creeps from her bed and along to pier.  She climbs down the ladder into the sea and discovers that, when immersed in water, she turns into a mermaid!  She swims out into the sea to some rocks and surprises another young mermaid named Shona, who has climbed onto the rocks to practice her siren singing.  Shona is intrigued to see that, when Emily joins her on the rocks, her tail transforms into legs.  It seems that Shona is entirely mermaid and lives in a merfolk community deep in the sea near Emily’s home town of Brightport.  The two girls agree to meet at the rocks whenever they can both slip away, and soon become best friends.

Something about Emily reminds Shona of a story she heard in her history class, about a merman and a human woman who fell in love, were secretly married, and had a daughter together before they were discovered by the merfolk, and cruelly torn apart by King Neptune.  Determined to learn the truth of her past, Emily sets out to find out why her mother seems to have forgotten everything about her life with her father, and where the condemned merman of Shona’s history lesson is being held prisoner.

The Tail of Emily Windsnap is a fun story about an ordinary girl who turns out to be quite extraordinary and who braves the laws of merfolk to reunite her parents.  This book is appropriate for readers from Grade 4 to 6.

FernFolio Editor