A personal quest for the elusive mermaid. From the seas of antiquity to the city streets of today, A Mermaid's Tale explores the myth and meanings of the mermaid through time and across cultures. The book also takes us on a personal journey, as the author reflects on her lifelong obsession with and passion for mermaidenry.
Beginning with Melusina, the bathing mermaid par excellence, Amanda Adams goes on to describe the seductive sirens and their honeyed songs, the powerful Arctic sea goddess Sedna, and the long-haired rusalki of Russian lore, among other legendary mermaids. As she tells their stories, she considers the womanly, passionate, rage-filled, and seductively sweet sides of the mermaid and how those traits reflect the lives and moods of women who live on drier shores.
Pouring Morton's salt into the tub as a child – determined to sprout a real mermaid's tail – hearing the siren's song on Northern California beaches, reckoning with the mermaid's brazen sexuality, and pondering the selchie legends of lost sealskins and terrestrial marriage, Adams also expresses a love of the mermaid that surely no sea-bound sailor could ever match.
Grounded in cultural anthropology, folklore studies, and intellectual rigor, A Mermaid's Tale also draws on literature, poetry, and mythology for its insights. Most of all, it is a book filled with enchantment, telling mermaid stories with depth and detail and describing Adams swim through the ocean of her own life in search of the unusual, the beautiful, and the perfectly extraordinary.
