I Was a Teenage Mermaid

Best friends Hailey and Claire are twelve years old and lamenting the fact that their favorite summer hang-out, the near-deserted Capri Beach Club, is about to be closed forever. More than that, they’re both dreading the end of summer when Claire will be moving away. Then one day they find a feisty mermaid named Aquamarine living in the Capri’s swimming pool.

Welcome to Aquamarine, Alice Hoffman’s short (all-too-short) novel—her first written for young teens. Though Hoffman has previously written a couple of children’s books, her novels have been mainly for adults (Practical Magic, The River King, Here on Earth and others). Still, there’s always been a little bit of pixie dust sprinkled on most of the pages. In interviews, Hoffman has said she uses fairy tales as her models and is more interested in creating alternate universes, not everyday reality.

There’s a little of the everyday in Hailey and Claire’s world, but there’s also plenty of Hans Christian Andersen. Hoffman’s style skips along light as a beach ball blown by the wind. At heart, however, the two girls are facing some very serious fears—the end of the Capri and the end of their lifelong friendship:

Once the bulldozers started in on the wooden cabanas, once they destroyed the pool and the patio and the snack bar, wasn’t it possible that Claire would no longer remember summers spent at the Capri with her parents?…When the Capri was gone, maybe they would forget each other as well. They’d grow up and be just like all those other people who didn’t know what it meant to have your best friend living right next door, grown-ups who had no idea of what it was like to have someone understand you so well they could tell what you were thinking before you even spoke aloud.

Then, in the last days of August, the magic happens late one night:

The wind was so strong, it knocked on the rooftops and rattled the stars up above. Both Hailey and Claire had the feeling that something was about to happen, in spite of how much they wanted their lives to remain the same.

Not a chance of that happening after they find a mermaid in the bottom of the pool, stranded there by the big storm.

Her hair was pale and silvery and her nails were a shimmering blue. Between each finger there was a thin webbing, of the sort you might find on a newborn seal or a duck.

“What are you two staring at?” the mermaid said, when she turned and saw the girls gaping.

Her voice was as cool and fresh as bubbles rising from the ocean. She was as beautiful as a pearl, with a faint turquoise tinge to her skin and eyes so blue they were the exact same color as the deepest sea. But her watery beauty didn’t mean the mermaid knew her manners.

Despite the fact that Aquamarine is “much ruder than most creatures you might find at sea,” the two girls decide to pull off one last adventure before their Summer of Friendship ends. They play matchmaker between Aquamarine and Raymond, the darkly handsome, happy-go-lucky snack bar attendant.

That’s all I’ll tell you of Aquamarine’s plot…but if you’ve been paying attention in your Romantic Movies 101 class, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how the whole thing turns out.

The trouble with Aquamarine is that it all “turns out” much too quickly. Hoffman’s word choice and sentence composition are pitch-perfect and lyric, but while there’s a density of language, there’s a sparsity of pages (98 of them, to be exact). Add to this the fact that the publisher, Scholastic, designed the volume with plenty of white space on the pages and you’ve got a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reading experience. I read my copy while I was dining alone at a Mexican restaurant; I finished the book before I reached the bottom of my first helping of chips and salsa. And I’m a fast eater.

Sadly, the brevity of Aquamarine works against it. We’re never allowed to get close to any of the characters: Raymond remains a stereotype cabana boy character, Aquamarine isn’t quirky enough and Claire and Hailey are little more than the kind of sweetly pining young girls you’d find in a Mary Kate and Ashley video. I wanted more, more, more and by the time I polished off the last tortilla chip, I was starting to wonder if Hoffman didn’t have extra flesh to drape on this bare-bones book but, for some reason, held off because she was afraid young readers wouldn’t endure a volume they’d have to hold with two hands.

Well, all I can say is, when I was a boy (a sweetly pining young boy), I would read thick-n-chunky books like A Wrinkle in Time, The Witch of Blackbird Pond and Little House in the Big Woods. I never once let my eyes slip off the page or had to stifle a yawn. There’s nothing wrong with a brick-sized children’s book. You’d be surprised how many marvelous and multi-colored worlds can be hidden inside bricks at the library.

But maybe things are different these days. After all, Mrs. Hoffman has to compete with the Disney Channel’s dumbed-down hyperkinetic entertainments, the sugar-coated blare of Britney Spears and the cordless-phone conversations with friends breathlessly giggling about the oh-so-cute boy in the third row of Mrs. Harmon’s class (hey, I’m the father of a teenage girl; I speak from experience). Against this synthetic culture-noise, I guess long books about mermaids and cabana boys don’t stand a chance.

So what kind of person reads Aquamarine? You’d be surprised.

For the past three weeks, the book sat next to my computer in the basement, waiting for me to scratch out a review. One day last week, while he was searching the Internet for anime art, my oldest son—a 16-year-old who normally disdains All Things Gooey and Romantic—picked up Aquamarine and, like me, read it in one sitting.

After I had my eyebrows surgically removed from my hairline, I asked him what he thought of it. “I liked it a lot, but I’m with you, Dad,” he said. “I think it was way too short. I would have liked to see more of the romantic relationship developed between the mermaid and the snack bar guy.”

High praise indeed, coming from a teenager who flees in terror whenever a Meg Ryan-Tom Hanks movie comes on.