Forgive My Fins | Tera Lynn Childs

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Lily doesn't know how to say it. She's.... head over heels for swim-team god Brandon and wants to ask him to the dance, now that he's single for the first time in three years. And she's running out of time. You see, she's got a secret, she's not who she says she is. She's not an ordinary teenage girl.

She's a mermaid.

And not just any mermaid.

A Thalassinian princess. If anyone found out who she really was, she'd be in a tsunmani of trouble. But one kiss and a case of mistaken identity threaten to stir up quite a storm over the quiet sea that was Lily's life on the land.

I didn't like this at first. I'm not quite sure I still like it. But I continued reading, far further than I thought I would, because I know exactly who would like this book -- sixth-grade me. I can say this with fair certainty because I've started to read my old middle-school diaries in order to better understand where my students are coming from. I expected to find a minute by minute recount of my life, as my high school diaries had, but I don't. In fact, I'm barely a featured star in my diaries from this time.

They are all about boys. Which boys I like, which ones my best friend likes, who is talking to the boys they like and who isn't. I usually wasn't, so there weren't very many paragraphs about me. Each boy has a nickname and is given 24-news houresque coverage. It's not terribly readable.

But something about discovering this about myself made this book a little bit more relatable. Lily's whole story shouldn't be about the boy she originally likes and the one she comes to, but it is. Her whole existance shouldn't be centered on whether or not a boy will come to the dance with her, nor should she have to think about forging a life-long bond while she's a teenager but she does.

Because as you start realizing boys, well, there's little room for anything else, even if your everything else is that fact that you are a MERMAID given the opportunity to live on LAND and treat it like your own personal rumspringa. As an adult, I want to tear my hair and beat my head, shaking the book until Lily snapes out of her haze and starts thinking about things bigger than Brody and Quince. But as a reader of my sixth grade diaries, I take pause. While Lily is written as older than that age, her naitave about relationships, her first kiss status and her inability to think outside of her relationship to these boys is, well, just a part of growing up.

Not going to call it the read of the year, but I see a place for it on the shelf.

Posted on Friday, Nov 26, 2010