The main protagonist, Peri the fisherman’s daughter, begins the book withdrawn, sullen and careless about her appearance (it’s a wonderful play on words that “peri” can mean “a beautiful and graceful girl”). The characterization, as in all of McKillip’s stories, is vivid. Which is a good way for a story about the sea to feel. Yet it leaves me not deeply content and satisfied, but restless. I sense that there’s no other way for this story to end. The story ebbs and flows naturally around the shapes and sounds of words and images. To use a poetry metaphor, McKillip’s style isn’t like iambic quadrameter or pentameter, but rather like Gerard Manley Hopkin’s sprung rhythm. It makes perfect sense, but it’s fairy tale sense, not reasonable sense. The story inside is small but potent, like a well-crafted spell. This is a pocket-sized paperback book of 137 pages. And when you curse the sea, your curse touches every shore the sea washes. The king, his family, the fisherman’s daughter, her entire village. For when the sea calls in debts, everyone pays. And so begins a story of sorrow and loss. In anger, the sea woman exacted a terrible price… Meanwhile, the daughter of a fisherman lost her father in the way fishermen’s families everywhere lose fathers. In time, however, he married one of his own people and made her his queen. Once upon a time there was a king who fell in love with a woman of the sea.
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