River Mermaid

River Mermaid is a free verse novel told from the perspective of budding artist Mercedes whose own love for creating art is mirrored by her mother’s successful career in sculpting. The novel opens with Mercedes anticipating acceptance into a prestigious art school and sets up Mercedes’ otherwise average high school life. The day-to-day of high school crashes down around Mercedes when she receives a rejection letter instead of what she thought would be an acceptance letter, and her life only gets more complicated as her mother falls ill. While the novel started quite predictably, engaging more than a handful of high school tropes, the emotional build up is intense, and readers will connect to the variety of characters introduced throughout the novel.

After the rejection letter is received, the narrative quickly switches to Mercedes’ abandoning her artistic pursuits in exchange for an “easy” high school life. Readers learn about her crush, Ellis, and his awful friend Jeb, Mercedes’ best friend Sandra (who is happy that she gets to spend the rest of her high school days in the same building with her BFF), and the sometimes-tense relationship between Mercedes’ parents. Despite Mercedes no longer creating art, she is still connected to the art world through her mom and continues to visit her mother’s studio to see what her mother is working on. After complaining about headaches and general malaise, Mercedes’ mom has a seizure in the studio and initially tries to push her failing health off everyone’s radar. The doctors discover that Mercedes’ mom has cancer, and the initial optimistic prognosis transforms into a terminal diagnosis.

There is a lot of story, pain, and love to explore in verse. The balance between maintaining teenage perspective and diction while discussing the trauma of having a terminally ill parent is managed beautifully; readers will laugh and cringe at the teenage follies of having an unrequited crush and shed tears with the strong women who come together to celebrate the life of Mercedes’ mom. Readers will be rooting for Mercedes as she stumbles over her own decision-making and cheering her on when things fall into place. While the text is quite quick to read through, there are moments of verse that slow the reading pace down completely, and artist profiles written in traditional prose are interspersed in the novel and offer a stunningly emotional break from the verse narrative.

River Mermaid would be best suited for students in Grades 10-12 based on the content; not only is the main character in Grade 11, but the prose includes swearing, discussions of death, and a brief sexual encounter between Mercedes and her boyfriend. River Mermaid would be a great read for any young artist “with big dreams”, and the free verse format makes it approachable for a wide variety of readers.