Dirty, poor, run-down Chelsea, Massachusetts, is not exactly an exciting place to be 13. That is, not until Sophie Swankowski meets a mermaid when she’s hanging out down by the creek with her best friend. Syrena isn’t your typical mermaid – she’s a trash-talking, ancient creature from the rivers of Poland, and she’s come to tell Sophie about her destiny.It turns out, Sophie fulfills a prophecy about a girl who will bring magic and hope back to the world. Now, she has to learn to harness and use

I'm not saying this is a perfect book, and I don't think it's for everybody, but I LOOOOVVVVVEEED it. One of the reasons I picked it up was that Daniel Handler wrote a rave review of it, and that makes sense to me because I think Michelle Tea and Danielle Handler have somewhat similar styles, in that they are a bit wordy and pretentious but beautiful. I love them both for it, but I can theoretically understand where some readers would find it to be a drawback.I loved how organically diverse Merm...

Let the fierce, adolescent-style summer reading begin. This book moves at the super quick pace of a magical YA novel, which it is! But it brings a kind of interiority and queer wisdom which I don't remember in, say, Chronicles of Narnia. Proud of and excited for Michelle Tea, as she pushes into new fictional terrain in her work. Polish witches, curanderas, teenage lesbian/gender blurring mentor figures, big Puerto Rican immigrant families, single working moms, a mermaid who cusses, and a determi...

Michelle Tea's Valencia was the perfect salve for my troubled little closeted queer heart a few years back--I loved and needed it so much you don't even know, I can't hype it enough--and I really enjoyed Rose of No Man's Land (unforgettable read), so naturally I was thrilled when I heard about this book. Lovely cover and design too so well done McSweeney's.Unfortunately this didn't live up to my expectations. The writing was usually lovely and all the magical world-building was candy-delicious a...

This is such an odd, magical book. It's not a perfect book by any means, but it's so full of heart and soul that I just couldn't help but get lost in it. It's very unique in every way: setting, characters, story, voice. I loved the illustrations, I thought they went along with the story perfectly and really enhanced the experience. I'll definitely be continuing with this strangely beautiful series when the next book is released.

2 stars. Any book that takes me two months to finish can't be that great. While Mermaid In Chelsea Creek has some good aspects, like appealing magical realism and a sweet wlw romance plot, it's far too boring to be engaging. The Bad; Namely, PlottingThis book is incredibly slow and undriven. The plot developed slowly and very undramatically. I enjoyed the second half slightly more, but it's all pretty boring. In fact, we know the villain by the halfway mark. Yet none of the characters actually d...

There is something about Michelle Tea's voice that is super-addictive. I can't get enough of her slightly damaged yet fierce, tragic but hilarious heroines and their casually intimate, piercingly funny stream-of-consciousness narratives. I've enjoyed everything she's written from "Valencia" to "Rose of No Man's Land," which was technically not a YA book but felt like one to me. So I was thrilled to hear she was writing a YA novel for McSweeney's new YA imprint. And when my copy finally arrived f...

Michelle Tea writes amazingly of real world relationships. The stuff between the main character and the mom, and the main character and the best friend felt really, really incredible, lived in, and true.Unfortunately, this is a YA fantasy novel. And Michelle Tea doesn't do those things nearly as well (and, didn't have an editor who'd ever done these before either, or so I've heard). The YA-ness of the book seemed to talk down to its nominal audience of young people in a lot of ways. And the fant...

I adore Michelle Tea, my favourite of her books is Valenciaso I was pretty excited about reading this, the first in a young adult series. I was sort of expecting more of the same Tea that I love, but this is pretty different to her other books and reminded me of Francesca Lia Block. It's a gritty (ish) urban fantasy novel with talking pigeons and magic and the ability to get into peoples hearts to find out what they are feeling. I really enjoyed it, and loved bits like this:"It was a piece of gl...

Despite a slow start, this book captured my attention with it's magical realism. The plight young Sophie faces may not be a familiar one, yet as a girl on the cusp on young adulthood she is all to easy to relate to. The fantasy elements of this story were woven wonderfully with the pain and anguish of growing up. I can't wait to read more of this series - though waiting for the next instalment will be difficult.Originally published on LibraryThing Dec.22, 2013 (x)

What makes this book bad isn’t that it’s terrible. It’s that it’s so goddamn good at being mediocre. Everything from the writing “style” to vocabulary to plot construction screams rudimentary. There were two things that really perplexed me about this book:the villain’s motives/plans (or I suppose, lack thereof is more fitting) and the reader demographic. It seems as if this book is suited best for twelve-year-olds but will then adds in obscenities or innuendos. Though, frankly, this book isn’t r...

I can't even with this beautiful book. Ordinary girl in a desperately ordinary, fucked-up town discovers she is a witch meant to save the world. Finds her magical family and teachers in pigeons, an ancient grimy mermaid, her doting pediatrician, a tenderqueer Chicana bruja and her curandera mom, the sweetest and most powerful babushka, and a dog that used to be her grandfather. And this is only the first of the trilogy! Wtf!

Well, this book clearly tries to be very edgy YA, and it has a beautiful cover but it was just so badly constructed and written, I'm a little amazed at it. It's very deliberately a world which is extremely ugly, filled with sad and despairing people, and you sort of think it's going for a grimdark take. But then it's also extremely simple with two sides of pure good and pure evil? I really don't understand what this book was trying to tell me, and it didn't even have a real plot structure. The e...

An old Polish fairy tale, strongly believed from those women who came from the old country, tells of a girl who will come and straighten out the cruel, dirty world they live in. Sophie Swankowski is 13 years old, lives in the broken down town of Chelsea, Massachusetts. Sophie and her best friend play the "pass-out" game just to feel like they are somewhere else. Sophie meets the mermaid, a filthy swearing creature, who tells her how special she is and will bring the magic. From talking pigeons,

First things first: I wish this had gone through another handful of rounds of edits. I say this not just because I found a typo or weird grammatical error every 20th page or so (there was that!), but because the concept of the book is strong, and there are more than a few scenes that are sweet and sad and totally heart-rending, but the voice was never quite consistent. The tone jumped around a bit such that it felt like one chapter was meant for middle school readers, the next one for late teena...

"The children ran out into the streets and the old women thought quietly about how a place could have no magic, how their grandchildren would grow up magicless and never even know it. And the old women would shed a tear and lament the old countries they'd abandoned, longing for a land where the magic came up into their bones just from standing on its earth" (9).Eek, I wanted to like this book so bad (witchy and explicitly working-class, set in Chelsea, MA), but I'm rounding up if we're honest. C...

This book falls into a category that I never knew I needed - lower-class urban fantasy.Not, like, lower-class as in not-classy, and not urban as in modern. I mean, this is a modern fantasy story for those of us who grew up on food stamps and eating cereal for dinner and hanging out at skeevy beaches full of cigarette butts because our parents were too tired, too jaded, or too messed up to stop us.We deserve magic in our lives too.There are stories out there about poor kids, yeah, but somehow the...

I think it's great for its target audience, unfortunately that's not me. Would recommend for a preteen or young teen. I keep trying YA, and I keep striking out.I will say there is some awesome folklore in here, and I was invested in the outcome, just not the story, but again, I think that's just the YA genre, and I can never seem to get into it.

It's a very good and interesting story, but it isn't well written. The language of the book is flat, always the same plodding tone, and there's not much action to break the long conversations between people telling the main character about her destiny. The POV is third-person omniscient, but switching into different character's perspectives and back happens at random times, even multiple times in the middle of a paragraph. Every character is written in the exact same voice, and even introducing

The only redeeming quality is that McSweeney's publications are always a gem to hold, look at, and page through. If weren't for this, and the fun sketches throughout the book, I would have put this down once I reached the talking pigeons. Yes, talking magical pigeons. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for some good magical realism and certain types of fantasy. One of my favorite authors is Jonathan Carroll. Good being the operative word, here. Mermaid in Chelsea Creek is not good, even as a young adul...