Freedom is another theme. Acyayia’s transformation frees her of the curse. Arcadia is free from her connections with white people when her house, built by slaves, is destroyed. Arcadia’s deaf and dumb son, Reggie cannot really experience the nastier elements of the world so he free from evil. David, by documenting his side of the story is finally letting his emotions escape so partly this book is a form of release.

The mermaid is a real character in the myth that we are all living in—a 400-year story where we think we can own or control one another, where power is currency, and where this delusion is driving us to a kind of Armageddon, that may be a requirement of rebirth. In the Advantages of Age interview, Roffey is asked what her mermaid is a symbol of, and she responds, that they’re “the quintessential ‘other’, a chimera, the mermaid is womxn, as a symbol of the outsider, the outcast; often she has been blamed, shamed and exiled. My mermaid is a symbol of otherness, for sure.” I think their outsider or othered status is why Aycayia, Reggie, David, Arcadia, and Life are drawn to and can empathize with each other. As Aycayia comes to understand her new body and the new world in which she is now living, David, the man who found and saved her, must deal with the fact that you can take the woman out of the ocean, but you can’t take the ocean out of the woman. And so a mythical adventure unwinds, wrapping us all in its spell. Monique Roffey is a writer of verve, vibrancy and compassion, and her work is always a joy to read.” —Sarah Hall, author of Burntcoat

What makes the novel sing is how Roffey fleshes out these mythical goings-on with pin-sharp detail from the real world, as Aycayia, hidden away in David’s bedroom, navigates the perils (and pleasures) of life on land. After her tail rots, she relearns to walk in an old pair of David’s green suede Adidas. Her nostrils bleed “all kind of molluscs and tiny crabs”. David worries that the smell and the noise of her wordless song might attract nosy neighbours, not least Priscilla, whose mean-spirited meddling injects a dose of malevolent comic energy into the action. Flood, Alison (26 January 2021). " 'Utterly original' Monique Roffey wins Costa book of the year". The Guardian. ISSN 1756-3224. Archived from the original on 10 February 2021 . Retrieved 20 July 2021. This book doesn’t ‘seem’ like anything that I would have normally chosen by myself. In fact I’m sure of it. One can’t help admiring the boldness of Roffey’s vision. . . . Sentence by sensuous sentence, Roffey builds a verdant, complicated world that is a pleasure to live inside. . . . Aycayia is a magical creature, though rendered so physically you might start to believe in the existence of mermaids.” —Shruti Swamy, The New York Times This might sound like a run-of-the-mill, Splash-type story, but I can assure you it is not: “Aycayia sat down on a bench by the lookout on the curve of the road and nibbled on the mango skin. She tugged it down in one neat strip… If she said yes to marry, she could cook in a new way, in an oven. She had already learnt again what heat could do. She knew what fire could do to a potato, a yam, a pumpkin, or even bodi. She could wash the dishes with frothy green liquid…. But in her last life, men could have more than one wife; that was normal…. Would she have to share David one day?”

Priscilla sat in his office chair, one leg up on his desk. One hand rested on her pussy. Teacher's Pet, I wanna be Teacher's Pet... The historical ramifications of colonisation and imperialism are vividly present even in 1976 with the present of a white woman who owns most of the residences on the island. She is a perfectly nice woman and gets on well with David, but the legacies of slavery and ownership of colonised land, property and people is glaringly present in the daily lives of the residents of St Constance. It’s a sobering reminder of the long-lasting scars of colonialism. but there are still a few people round St Constance who remember him as a young man and his part in the events in 1976, when those white men from Florida came to fish for marlin and instead pulled a mermaid out of the sea Besides, Grace says, laughing, those who levelled accusations at her of having made Māori “the good guys” of Potiki, and white New Zealanders “the bad guys”, did not realise she had never specified what race the greedy developers in the story were. Old woman, pretty woman, both rejects. Womanhood was a dangerous business if you didn’t get it right.V: Definitely, definitely. Ah, once again, I have to thank you for introducing me to another author and book that I probably never would have come across on my own. As a feminist, activist, and writer I’m just in awe as I learn more about Roffey as a person. And I’m so interested in reading her other books, including Archipelago, which she describes as an eco-novel. I’m going leave our listeners, some of whom may be writers as well, with something Roffey said that really resonated with me: That mermaid woman is the first time I see clearly how to be a man. How to be myself, behave well. Is like she teach me how to be on the right side of good. You can’t play games with she. She so innocent.”

The structure of the novel was original and really worked for me. The two narrators did a wonderful job to bring the story and the people to life. I am looking forward to reading more of Monique Roffey, a talented writer from Trinidad and Tobago. Although it’s funny — I have to say that when I didn’t know anything about the book except for its title, I was a little skeptical that it would be something I’d enjoy. But then I saw the cover art by artist Harriet Shillito for the Peepal Tree edition. And so, it depicts how the Taino mermaid named Aycayia is described in the story: “something ancient … the face of a human woman who once lived centuries past”; “her tail … yards and yards of musty silver … She must weigh four or five hundred pounds”; her tattoos “looked like spirals, and the spirals looked like the moon and the sun,” she must have been “a woman from the tribes that lived in these islands when everything was still a garden.” This same boy communicating through American Sign Language, which the mermaid understands immediately and describes as "language of the time before time". For me, life is made up of numerous influential voices and ideas: Buddhist dharma; the Caribbean lexicon; the tarot; text-speak; the secular world of London; the East End and its mosques and multiple immigrant histories, a part of London with its own vernacular… My life feels utterly fluid and diverse and yet works as a whole. So, everyday life shows me a non-linear form and that it’s utterly viable to compile a novel in the same way, to reflect this … T: Hey Vina! How are you? It was so good to have a bit of a break ... I say that knowing I haven’t really had a break. I just tend to fill in the time with other things, like sewing or online classes or reading. But it’s been raining so much here in London, I haven’t really gone out to do much of anything. How about you, how has your summer been so far?And I do find it fascinating how so many other authors we’ve read — Mexican author Fernanda Melchor who wrote Hurricane Season; Jamaican-born Nicole Dennis-Benn who wrote Patsy; Japanese writer Mieko Kawakami, who wrote Breasts and Eggs; and now Monique Roffey — have all created outsider/othered characters, other women characters, to explore complex social issues, from misogyny, to femicide, to homophobia and transphobia, to colorism and racism. As writers we need to be developing new stories and a new language around climate change for the future. Writers, as culture bearers, can and should, inspire others, particularly the generations under us … Stories help heal humanity. I believe we writers need to be writing for the young, the old and for our planet. One day while David is singing, he attracts the attention of “sea-dweller” he thought only existed in fairy tales and island “ole talk”. David sees the Mermaid, goes through a range of emotions one being curiosity. Daily he revisits the spot where he first sights the Mermaid, she begins showing up to hear him sing and play the guitar. They form a sort of bond that continues for weeks until the Mermaid begins listening for the hum of David’s boat. In a stunning fusion of story and voice, this is told in a lyrical manner which uses Caribbean cadences and rhythm alongside Aycayia's free verse narrative, foregrounding language as one of the contested issues here: the 'standard' harsh American of the men from Florida contrasted with variations of accent and communications from sign language to singing. I listened to the audiobook and benefited from the authentic reading - I don't think this is a book which should be read in 'received pronunciation' English!

The plot and themes of the book were interesting enough, weaving in criminal behavior, love stories, and historical racism in a unique Caribbean setting. And inexplicably overlooked for the Booker Prize and Women's Prize, which says rather more about those prizes than the book. I prefer when it's substituted with a realistic description allowing me to see characters more as fully fleshed human beings. Actually, when I think about it, we’ve looked at a number of books that grapple with the legacy of colonialism from all over the world, right? There was Insurrecto, which centered on American colonization of the Philippines and more recently Potiki, which talked about the displacement and cultural subordination of the Māori people by British settler colonists. And so, it was interesting to notice similar themes that have come up in these books or that have been pointed out to us by the writers. So for instance, the appearance of untranslated Waray in Insurrecto and te reo Māori in Potiki not only gives cultural texture to our reading experience, but I think it also symbolizes an act of resistance against colonialism.Every sentence in Monique Roffey’s extraordinary book is alive with fluming, amphibious intelligence and alert to the blessing, and the curse, of love in a life of flux. A new sea hymnal to challenge, and change, the old dark songs that humans know by heart.” —Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia! and Orange World and Other Stories