Hm....hmmm. "I control the fish girl" Neptune the fisherman proclaims to an unsuspecting crowd of visitors, visitors of his magnificent aquarium of untold treasures. The most valuable one is an adolescent mermaid who can't talk. An adolescent mermaid who was raised by a man that calls her his treasure. No she doesn't get a name. She gets to be his pet, his main attraction. This book is disturbingly normal. It reminds me of a fable or fairy tale meant to be a cautionary tale, but ironically most people find it more entertaining than scary. You have a grown-ass man build a whole aquarium to house a kidnapped mermaid. He tells her stories about her people as payment for going along with his rouse. She plays hide and seek with the guest,making sure they don't see her. They drop coins into the tank and she collects them. Everybody wins! But there is trouble in the horizon when he finds out about her only human friend, Livia. Who tries to tell her mom, but is promptly ignored. Mira, the name Lucia assigns to her knew friend is tired of being imprisoned and ventures out and discovers she wants to be apart of the human ( )

Note: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher at ALA Midwinter 2017. ( )

The art is pretty; the story's plot is pretty weak. ( )

Donna Jo Napoli has written many books based on fairy and folk tales, so I assumed that this was a spinoff of The Little Mermaid, but it's more a coming of age story and not a tragic, wasted sacrifice story. The main character is helped in her discoveries and personal growth by a human girl of about the same age and an octopus. ( )

A fairly standard middle grade tale about beckoned independent and discovering the truth about your world. Weisner's art and coloring is beautiful.

Mira longs to be free from her existence in a sideshow aquarium, even though she lives with her friends and a man who acts as a fickle father figure. As she begins to make a friend, she realizes that Neptune (as the man calls himself) is a fraud, and hiding many things from her (and that she can shed her tail to become legs). As she finds her courage, she eventually becomes free and fully human.

Too many questions: was she really a mermaid rescued as a baby? Why did the ocean reject her? How did she manage to ignore Naptune's lies for so long when she's able to discover them in, like, a day? ( )