Description: The year he is ten, Daniel Jennings meets a mermaid. With a single word, she opens the world for him, though he must puzzle out her meaning over another ten years on the wind-scoured coast of Coquille, the Pacific Northwest island upon which Daniel lives with his grandfather. They are a quiet pair, islands themselves. Daniel, for instance, never tells his grandfather about the key that, after the mermaid slips away, a sea otter brings to him in a shell. The boy wears the key on a string around his neck and soon learns its miraculous powers for saving life. His grandfather never teas him of a girl whose name Daniel knows but does not recognize until after the old man can tell him nothing. Daniel's story is of marvelous happenings, told in the rapt and measured voice of a young man finding, for the first time, peace after tumult, pattern beneath life s apparent imbalance. The mermaid. Is she a messenger, a creature from one of the many stories the boy has read? Or is she a ghost?

Please Wait