137 pages
Published 1988
Read from September 18 to September 19
Rating: 3.5 out of 5
Unless you count The Forgotten Beasts of Eld, which was marketed as such, this is my first exposure to McKillip’s fiction for younger readers. Fifteen year old Peri has lost her father to the sea and her mother to grief. Her mentor, who taught her ineffectual hexes in a hut on the beach, has disappeared. Then a bedraggled prince and a sea-dragon on a golden chain show up in quick succession. Could there really be a strange country under the sea, like the one Peri’s mother daydreams about?
McKillip’s prose is perfect for a young adult novel from this era, communicating complex feelings with beautiful clarity, layers of loss and yearning and frustration, of having no world to return to. Peri and her island village are vivid presences from the first page.
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