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A review by nebula402
The Blue Salt Road by Joanne M. Harris
4.0
I picked this up because I've enjoyed Joanna Harris's books in the past and because the cover art is so beautiful. I had no idea what the story was about when I started and was pleasantly surprised to discover a fairy tale! Our main character is a selkie - a seal that can transform into a human. He is fascinated by humans and wants to be around them. He sheds his sealskin and explores the nearby village where he falls in love with a local girl and gets her pregnant. Fearful that he will leave her and the unborn child, she steals his sealskin which makes him forget his true identity, trapping him on the land.
This book has a lot of the same themes as The Little Mermaid - love, sacrifice, belonging, kinship, and identity. As a seal, the selkie longs for the land and humans. As a human, he longs for the ocean and his past. The story ends with a compromise that ties the selkie to both places: the selkie can never return to the sea (because his wife destroyed his sealskin) but his daughter is able to live in both worlds.
The epilogue sums it up nicely: "This is ... a story of fear, and suspicion, and love, and men and women, and daughters, and sons, and all the dark spaces in between. This is the story of every man who ever felt trapped by a woman's love; the story of every woman who feared the tyranny of her fathers. And this is ... a story of change, betrayal, and forgiveness. But most of all, of love - between a man and a woman; a parent and child; or the love of a creature for their world."
This book has a lot of the same themes as The Little Mermaid - love, sacrifice, belonging, kinship, and identity. As a seal, the selkie longs for the land and humans. As a human, he longs for the ocean and his past. The story ends with a compromise that ties the selkie to both places: the selkie can never return to the sea (because his wife destroyed his sealskin) but his daughter is able to live in both worlds.
The epilogue sums it up nicely: "This is ... a story of fear, and suspicion, and love, and men and women, and daughters, and sons, and all the dark spaces in between. This is the story of every man who ever felt trapped by a woman's love; the story of every woman who feared the tyranny of her fathers. And this is ... a story of change, betrayal, and forgiveness. But most of all, of love - between a man and a woman; a parent and child; or the love of a creature for their world."