Water Tales

Best-selling author Alice Hoffman's luminous tale of nostalgia and enchantment, for readers both young and old. Twelve-year-old best friends Hailey and Claire are spending their last summer together when they discover something at the bottom of the murky pool at the Capri Beach Club. There, among the seaweed and jellyfish that a summer storm has blown in from the ocean, is a mysterious and beautiful creature with a sharp tongue and a broken heart, a mermaid named Aquamarine. As her six sisters beckon her to return to the sea, Aquamarine stubbornly persists in her search for love on land. But as she starts to fade in the burning August sun, a rescue must begin. On the edge of growing up, during a summer that is the hottest on record, Hailey and Claire learn that life can take an unpredictable course, that friendship is forever, and that magic can be found in the most unexpected places.

Three friends in search of a place to belong find that home is truly where the heart is in this new tale of enchantment from master storyteller Alice Hoffman. 13 year-old Martha Glimmer is convinced this is the worst time of her life. Her mother died, she grew 7 inches, and she has to put up with a woman who plys Martha's lonely father with food and opinions about how 13 year-old girls should behave. Martha longs to leave Oak Grove and travel. Martha's best friend Trevor and his brother Eli also want to leave Oak Grove. Nicknamed Trout and Eel because of the thin webbing between their fingers and toes, they long to see the ocean. Praise for INDIGO:This slim offering finds Hoffman (Aquamarine) once again in mermaid mode. In landlocked Oak Grove where a flood years ago has made the townspeople so fearful of water that the local swimming pool stays drained 13-year-old Martha Glimmer mourns her mother's death and chafes under the disapproving ministrations of busybody neighbor Hildy Swoon. Martha's best friends Trevor and Eli McGill adopted brothers better known as Trout and Eel have problems of their own, including town gossip about their odd eating habits (salt water, raw tuna) and their webbed fingers and toes. After Hildy ruins Martha's prized possession, a shawl that had belonged to her mother, and the hydrophobic Mr. McGill repaints his sons' bedroom white (they preferred the ""endless blue"" of the sea), the three of them decide to run away. Broad clues point to the story's core secret, that Trout and Eel are the sons of a mermaid. An accomplished storyteller, Hoffman deftly interweaves themes of friendship, identity and the tension between family ties and freedom that adolescence inevitably brings (""I thought if you got too near to water, you would swim away,"" says Charlie McGill to his boys. They will, they assure him ""But then we'll swim back""). However, the text has been stretched to fit the format of a novel, which may unfairly raise readers' expectations. Together with the sketchy characterizations and particularly the author's cool, dispassionate tone, the presentation may hamper readers' full pleasure in the tale.--Publishers Weekly, March 11, 2002Hoffman's previous foray into fabulae for young adults was -Aquamarine (BCCB 2/01), a tale about a stranded mermaid helped by two soon-to-be-parted friends. The setting in this second water-fable is not a seaside resort but the landlocked town of Oak Grove; the main characters here are also high and dry, albeit not literally. Thirteen-year-old Martha is mourning the death of her beloved mother and saddened by her father's consequent self-isolation. Her two best friends, adopted brothers Trevor and Eli (a.k.a Trout and Eel) are isolated by their physical differences (webbing between their fingers and toes) and by their desire for the sea, which they have never seen. When the three decide to leave home and head for the coast, their departure is complicated by a violent rainstorm that threatens to drench the town. Fortunately, the boys' natural gifts allow them to save the town from flooding, and eventually their mysterious origins are revealed (they're the offspring of a mermaid and a sailor). The plot is obvious, and it's device, not drama, that brings this story to its contrived end. Hoffman does capture the essence of the innocently knowledgeable adolescent in the characterizations of Martha, Trout, and Eel, however, and the supernatural overtones will intrigue readers. The production values for this little novella are very high-running headers, page numbers, and full-page illustrations for each chapter are done in an inky blue; endpapers feature a light-shot sea with fish silhouettes. Fancy but facile, this is still an easy booktalk, and it may have transient appeal for mer-people aficionados.--Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, June 2002 Water's dangerous and that's always been true,"" says Charlie McGill. Everyone in small, dry, landlocked Oak