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Merrow

Ananda Braxton-Smith · back to the book

What’s in it

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

A Monster Calls

Patrick Ness · 224 pages

A brilliant, graphic novel written by young but promising Patrick Ness. This is the story about 13 year old Conor and his mother who is dying of cancer. Conor has to face the cruelty of real life and learn to let his close and dearest go. When no human can help him Monster appears...

Death of a ParentAbsent ParentAtmosphericLyrical Prose
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Stormswept

Helen Dunmore · 299 pages

Atmospheric and beautifully written novel from the award-winning author of INGO. Morveren lives with her parents and twin sister Jenna on an island off the coast of Cornwall, circled by the sea except at low tide. Morveren lives with her twin sister Jenna on an island off the coast of Cornwall, circled by the sea except at low tide. One day, Morveren finds a beguiling teenage boy in the rock pool

Mermaids and SirensIslandAtmosphericMiddle Grade
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The Changeling Sea

Patricia A. McKillip · 139 pages

The sea has taken everything away from Periwinkle; it has drowned her fisherman father and left her mother barely able to cope. So Periwinkle, a chambermaid at the inn of a small fishing village, decides to hex the sea. It works surprisingly well, disrupting the sea queen's magic. A chained sea monster appears from the depths, and the king's melancholy son, Kir, nearly drowns trying to get to the

Mermaids and SirensIslandAtmosphericLyrical Prose
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The Book of Speculation

Erika Swyler · 376 pages

"Simon Watson, a young librarian on the verge of losing his job, lives alone on the Long Island Sound in his family home--a house, perched on the edge of a bluff, that is slowly crumbling toward the sea. His parents are long dead, his mother having drowned in the water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, works for a traveling carnival reading tarot cards, and seldom calls. On a day in

Mermaids and SirensDeath of a ParentAtmosphericLyrical Prose
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The Mermaid of Black Conch: A novel

Monique Roffey · 240 pages

Mermaids and SirensIslandAtmosphericLyrical Prose
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The Scorpio Races

Maggie Stiefvater · 435 pages

It happens at the start of every November: the Scorpio Races. Riders attempt to keep hold of their water horses long enough to make it to the finish line. Some riders live. Others die. At age nineteen, Sean Kendrick is the returning champion. He is a young man of few words, and if he has any fears, he keeps them buried deep, where no one else can see them. Puck Connolly is different. She

Death of a ParentIslandLyrical ProseAtmospheric
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The Mermaid's Mirror

L.K. Madigan · 320 pages

Lena has lived her whole life near the beach, walking the shore, breathing the salty air, swimming in the cold water, and watching the surfers rule the waves. As her sixteenth birthday approaches, Lena vows to learn to surf. Her father forbids it. But something Lena can’t identify at first—an ancient, powerful magic—keeps drawing her to the water. One day, she finally catches sight of it: a beauti

Mermaids and SirensAbsent ParentAtmosphericFantasy
❤️

Harry Potter Boxset

J.K. Rowling

Absent ParentDeath of a ParentAtmosphericMiddle Grade
❤️

Caraval

Stephanie Garber · 444 pages

A legendary competition. A mesmerizing romance. An unbreakable bond between two sisters. Scarlett Dragna has never left the tiny island where she and her sister, Tella, live with their powerful, and cruel, father. Now Scarlett’s father has arranged a marriage for her, and Scarlett thinks her dreams of seeing Caraval—the faraway, once-a-year performance where the audience participates in the

IslandAbsent ParentLyrical ProseAtmospheric
❤️

Keeper

Kathi Appelt · 399 pages

On the night of the blue moon when mermaids are said to gather on a sandbar in the Gulf of Mexico, ten-year-old Keeper sets out in a small boat, with her dog BD and a seagull named Captain, determined to find her mother, a mermaid, as Keeper has always believed, who left long ago to return to the sea.

Mermaids and SirensAbsent ParentAtmosphericMiddle Grade
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Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits

Robin McKinley · 269 pages

What magical beings inhabit earth’s waters? Some are as almost-familiar as the mer-people; some as strange as the thing glimpsed only as a golden eye in a pool at the edge of Damar’s Great Desert Kalarsham, where the mad god Geljdreth rules; or as majestic as the unknowable, immense Kraken, dark beyond the darkness of the deepest ocean, who will one day rise and rule the world.  These six tales fr

Mermaids and SirensAtmosphericLyrical ProseFantasy
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The Mermaid Chair

Sue Monk Kidd · 335 pages

It's about a woman named Jessie Sullivan who has to return to her former home Egret island to take care of her mother. Within a monastery resides a chair carved with mermaids that supposedly was dedicated to a mermaid.Jessie meet a monk and falls for him although she is already married.....

Mermaids and SirensIslandDeath of a ParentLyrical Prose
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The Folk Keeper

Franny Billingsley · 176 pages

IslandLyrical ProseAtmosphericMiddle Grade
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The Seas

Samantha Hunt · 195 pages

The narrator of 'The Seas' lives in a tiny, remote, cruel seaside town. She is in love (unrequited) with an Iraq War veteran 13 years her senior and is also convinced that she is a mermaid. What she does to ease the pain of growing up lands her in prison. What she does to get out is the stuff of legend.

Mermaids and SirensAbsent ParentLyrical ProseMagical Realism
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Divine Rivals

Rebecca Ross · 384 pages

Eighteen-year-old Iris dreams that one day her writing will make a difference. A war between gods is raging, and she’s landed a prestigious job at the Oath Gazette. But at home, she’s barely holding it together. Her brother is missing on the frontline. Her mother is lost in a haze of addiction. And each night Iris pours her heart out in letters to her brother. Letters that will never be answ

Absent ParentDeath of a ParentLyrical ProseAtmospheric
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Emily Windsnap and the Monster from the Deep

Liz Kessler · 219 pages

Picture an island set in a glittering blue sea, sparkling with white sand and palm trees, a secret place where humans and merfolk live together. To Emily Windsnap — half mermaid, half human — her new home is perfect. That is, until Emily ruins everything by waking a legendary sea monster known as the kraken from its hundred-year sleep. . . . An enchanting tale with a fabulous monster, engaging cha

Mermaids and SirensIslandMiddle GradeFantasy
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Other Birds

Sarah Addison Allen · 320 pages

Between the real and the imaginary, there are stories that take flight in the most extraordinary ways. Right off the coast of South Carolina, on Mallow Island, The Dellawisp sits-a stunning old cobblestone building shaped like a horseshoe, and named after the tiny turquoise birds who, alongside its human tenants, inhabit an air of magical secrecy. When Zoey comes to claim her deceased mother

IslandDeath of a ParentAtmosphericLyrical Prose
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Absent ParentAtmosphericDeath of a ParentLyrical Prose
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Mermaid in Chelsea Creek

Michelle Tea · 285 pages

Everyone in the broken-down town of Chelsea, Massachusetts, has a story to tell. But there's one story they all still tell: the oldest and saddest but most hopeful story, the one about the girl who will be able to take their twisted world and straighten it out. The girl who will bring the magic.

Mermaids and SirensAtmosphericFantasyMagical Realism
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The Vanishing Act

Mette Jakobsen · 218 pages

Living alone on a tiny, snow-covered island with her father, dog and a magician, twelve-year-old Minou deals with her mother's abandonment and hopes to find an explanation when a dead boy washes up on the beach.

Absent ParentIslandLyrical ProseAtmospheric
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Wonders of a Godless World

Andrew McGahan · 327 pages

IslandAtmosphericLyrical ProseMagical Realism
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A Swift Pure Cry

Siobhan Dowd · 320 pages

Absent ParentDeath of a ParentLyrical ProseIreland
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Teeth

Hannah Moskowitz

"Rudy's life is flipped upside-down when his family moves to a remote, magical island in a last attempt to save his sick younger brother, Dylan. While Dylan recovers, Rudy sinks deeper and deeper into his loneliness"--

Mermaids and SirensIslandAtmosphericFantasy
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Tropic of the Sea

Satoshi Kon · 207 pages

For as long as their family tradition tells, Yosuke Yashiro's family has taken care of a mermaid egg once every sixty years. Once it hatches they return it to the sea, and in return the mermaids bless their seaside town with bountiful catches of fish and calm waters. However, Yosuke's father has gone astray, and now he is using the mermaid egg for financial gain as a tourist attraction. The mermai

Mermaids and SirensIslandAtmosphericMagical Realism

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