Emily has just started at a new school, Brightport High (she’s in Year Seven, approximately America’s 6 th grade), but she has been struggling to make friends, one of the more influential girls at the school leading others away from Emily because Emily accidentally got Mandy in trouble with her parents. This is a story about friendship and finding friends and the promises of friendship. I read this at first as a metaphor for interracial marriages, but its lessons could just as easily be applied to homosexual marriages (as I write this, the US Supreme Court is hearing arguments for and against allowing employment discriminating based on sexual orientation and/or gender identity) in the story, of course, it is a merperson and a human SPOILER ALERT (in this case, a woman and a merman, twisting Hans Christian Anderson’s “Little Mermaid” tale type). This was a call against making non-traditional marriages illegal. I don’t hardly remember any mention of school-aged boys, human or merperson. Romance is a thing in this first novel left to the adults, which was refreshing. This was a story of the power of love: familial, romantic, and platonic. This was a good mystery, which I failed to solve entirely (I did solve pieces of it). I didn’t find any available copies of the printed book at my local libraries, but I came home with a copy of the audiobook, read by the appropriately named Finty Williams. I had always dismissed this book and this series as too fluffy to try, one of those that I would find too juvenile to be enjoyable, being well past the age of Kessler’s intended audience-or too girly, too concerned with the little dramas of middle school and flirtation, but a recent event for work sent me scurrying to quickly read it to be prepared to lead a discussion. Beeston's help, she is able to reveal herself for one shining moment before he erases those memories, and Emily joins her family again to live happily ever after.Spoilers are in white. Emily goes back to school one more time and with Mr. Shona is given a choice of having her memories erased like Millie or joining Emily and her family provided her parents approve. Instead, Neptune offers them the opportunity to live like a family, although they have to do it on an island in a secure location for the rest of their lives. Love should not be punished by incarceration. Neptune holds court, in complete control and after deliberating decides that Emily is right. Instead, she and Shona along with her mother and babysitter Millie are arrested and brought before Neptune to answer charges. Although she manages to find him, freeing her father is not as easy as she'd hoped it would be. He'd been arrested and incarcerated for falling in love with a human - something strictly forbidden by Neptune.Įmily decides to find her father, and with Shona's help she manages to break her way through the Great Mermer Reef to the other side where the prison is located. Shona is the first one to tell Emily about her father and correct the lie she'd been told her whole life. She ventures further from home each time, and on her second time out she meets another mermaid who introduces herself as Shona once she is over the shock of seeing her. As soon as she enters the water and her tail appears, she becomes graceful and feels tremendous power and control.Įmily begins sneaking out whenever she can, enjoying every minute in the water. Despite wanting out of the swimming classes, Emily loves the water. The first Wednesday of Year Seven will be one she remembers forever.Īlthough no one sees her tail appear, or thankfully disappear when she gets out of the water again, Emily is still too afraid to attend another class, especially after sneaking out that night and repeating the performance off the pier where King is docked. Shocked, and afraid, the swimming teacher helps her out of the water, but no one notices her legs joined and scaled. Emily's first lesson changes her life, beginning with the appearance of a tail where her legs should be when she first immerses herself in the pool. Until now, her mother's fear of the water had prevented Emily from learning to swim, despite repeated requests. Emily's life is fairly normal until she finally convinces her mother to allow her to take swimming lessons when she begins secondary school. The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler is a story about a 12-year-old girl who lives with her mother on a boat called the King of the Sea.
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