The Mer-Child: A Legend for Children and Other Adults

A well-known feminist writer and editor presents a sad but ultimately uplifting tale of two outcasts. The Mer-child, rejected by his people as the child of a sailor and a mermaid, meets the Little Girl, who is also rejected, not only because her mother is black and her father white, but because she is disabled. They form an intense and bittersweet friendship by the edge of the sea, and she grows up to become an ecologically concerned oceanographer. The tale invites comparison to Randall Jarrell's The Animal Family , but Morgan is no poet. Unlike Jarrell, she doesn't let the characters' interactions tell the story, and so drifts from the book's center--the well-handled friendship of the children--into clumsy and pedantic moralizing. Stylized drawings of sea life don't rescue this well-intentioned but flawed work. Ages 8-up. (Dec.)