I didn’t remember very much about this book at all. I remembered that a mermaid named, Sirena, fell in love w/ a human man, but that’s about it. I can’t even remember when I first read this book, but I know why I kept it. Ms. Napoli is very good at using the present tense when telling a story and the story itself is pretty compelling. Hmmm... I’m being a little too vague. It’s a good story.
Sirena and her sisters live in the Mediterranean Sea, and their life’s goal is to lure men through song to their island and make the men fall in love w/ them so they can gain immortality. Sirena goes along w/ this until a ship (possibly 2) is wrecked off the coast of their island, and eventually the men all die. One of her sisters was killed as well. Weeks go by and another ship comes close to their island, but though her sisters sing to bring the men in, Sirena refuses to sing and tries to warn the men on board. Failing to save the doomed men, Sirena leaves the island she has called home her whole life.
Always the odd ball of her school, Sirena swims to another island, Lemnos, thinking she will be far from humans and her deceitful sisters. The first few weeks pass w/o incident. No humans, no sisters. One morning, Sirena sees 2 sea serpents - 1 sent by the goddess Hera - and another ordinary one. Neither harms her, but soon after Sirena smells a ship near by. A group of soldiers had been ashore looking for fresh water. One of them was bitten by the serpent Sirena had seen before, and the men he was sailing w/ decide to leave him on the island to die.
After observing him for awhile and seeing that he is different from other men she has encountered, Sirena makes the bold and potentially dangerous decision to help the man by nursing him back to health. Without going into too much more detail, Sirena and Philoctetes fall in love and live together on Lemnos for 10 years. Then Odysseus and some other men, including Achilles' son (Phil and Achilles were buds) arrive at the island. They try to convince Phil to go w/ them so he can help put an end to the Trojan War. Phil wants to go, but not if Sirena doesn’t want him to go. She’s convinced that, although she loves him truly, he is under an enchantment b/c he heard her sing by accident one day shortly after they met. She tries to get help from Mother Dora, a sea nymph, by asking to be made mortal or making Phil immortal, but Mother Dora refuses to help. Sirena returns to Lemnos prepared to let Phil go but is surprised to find that he is prepared to stay for her sake. Unable to go on w/o knowing the truth, she asks Phil when he first loved her. He tells her he has always loved her, since the moment he first saw her, but she knows this is not so. She asks if it was when he heard her sing and he says no. It was when she built her first fire. At that moment, she knows that they truly love each other, and that she must let him go. He says he’ll return, but she tells him not to. He gives her one of the arrows that Heracles (Greek for Hercules) as a symbol of his undying love for her.
It’s a sweet love story w/o being sentimental or smutty. One of the reviews on the inside talks about it having a bittersweet ending and I think that’s a good way of putting it. It’s a quick read so it’s worth keeping.
