A quiet little book, about a found family. It starts with a lonely hunter who lives in a cabin in the woods, no other people around. One day he hears strange singing near the beach, and discovers a mermaid. He gradually gains her trust until she accompanies him home. She is delighted and intrigued by all the strange things in his house and the very different way he lives. They learn each others’ language, though he can never properly make the mermaid sounds so pretty much she uses English with him all the time. I really liked how it showed the strangeness of life of land as it appeared to the mermaid. For example, she was baffled by the hunter’s desire to take shelter from rain, detested sweet foods (thought honey was a horrifying thing trying to choke her), and didn’t understand that fire could hurt. I did find it odd that the story never said how she got from place to place (she doesn’t have legs after all) until near the very end, it mentioned how she had to drag herself across the land. Before then, it was just casually mentioned how she went here or there, without any note of the difficulty. Sometimes the hunter would carry her. She often remarked how the sea people thought her odd and eventually shunned her because she liked to visit the land, so then she spent all her time with the hunter. It seemed they longed for a child, and then one day the hunter killed a mother bear in self-defense (he got too close, too suddenly, in very close quarters) and brought home her orphaned cub. The couple were very happy raising the bear. Later on the hunter stole a lynx kitten from its family (there were five, so he figured the mother lynx wouldn’t miss one) and brought that home too. And near the end of the book, they find a young child on the beach after a shipwreck. So then their family feels complete, with a man, mermaid, bear, lynx and boy. It’s really lovely to read about how they all learned from one another- the bear and lynx behave very differently from people and have their own kind of needs, but they all found ways to make adjustments and get along. The boy learned from the hunter how to be human, from the mermaid how to swim excellently, etc. It really is a gentle and heartwarming story (if you ignore the fact that the animals were basically abducted from the wild by this lonely hunter). Nothing much happens in terms of plot, it’s just their day-to-day life and it ends in contentment.
Borrowed from the public library. Completed on 5/16/24.
