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Theodore has a little boat and a big passion: collecting fish. He loves nothing more than discovering a new fish for his collection. But one day, he finds something he's never seen before: a tiny creature in a beautiful shell. Ignoring the voice that tells him to leave her alone, he takes her home and puts her in a tank, where she gets weaker and weaker.
Can Theodore learn that the creature belongs in the ocean before it's too late?
Drawn in bright yet soothing, whimsical mermaid colors, this is a bright and beautiful keepsake and a kind reminder to kids to let nature be and look after our oceans. It's a dazzling and sparkling story of magic, friendship, and environmental conservation.
This heartwarming story is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed and best-selling Once Upon A Unicorn Horn and Once Upon a Dragon's Fire.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
May 7, 2024 -
Formats
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780711295322
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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April 15, 2024
Find out why mermaids have tails. A dark-skinned boy named Theodore rows his boat around a pastel-colored world filled with anthropomorphic sea creatures. He brings a hefty selection of fish back to his skylit home so he can watch "the way their scales shimmer...in the sunlight like jewels." Bright flecks in the illustrations provide a dreamy, enchanted quality--the book's biggest strength. When Theodore captures a mermaid--a tiny humanoid creatures with legs, surrounded by a clear shell--a booming voice tells him that "she belongs to the ocean," but he ignores it. Calling the mermaid Oceanne, he drops her into a suffocating, filterless fishbowl. As the mermaid sickens and her shell breaks, scenes darken and lose saturation. If an omnipotent voice hadn't already broadcast the story's moral, Theodore and readers might now put it together themselves in a satisfying exercise of agency and meaning-making. Instead, the loud voice repeatedly insists that Oceanne "belongs to the ocean" until Theodore finally brings her back. The sea is subdued and empty, but eventually fish after fish reappears, each giving Oceanne a sparkly scale until she revives and grows a tail. "All mermaids have tails," the narrative declares, "to remind us of something very important": that animals belong in the wild. While it's an important lesson, the preachy narrative talks down to readers rather than engaging them. Too didactic to be much fun but certainly pretty. (Picture book. 3-6)COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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