Midnight Pearls in Into the Forest

Jun 24, 2009 Mir rated it it was ok

Shelves: ya, fairy-tale, fantasy

Vigui茅's retelling of the Little Mermaid adds a couple new characters and a few more years in the heroine's life, but still turns out pretty thin -- literally, under 200 pages with not-very-small print. It felt like Vigui茅 was really struggling to get a full-length novel out of it. Might be okay for tweens, but wouldn't recommend it for adult readers.
Also, I was a bit disappointed that she stuck with "I saw you once from afar and now love you so much I will do extraordinarily stupid things for a ...more

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Apr 25, 2013 Katie J Schwartz rated it liked it

Shelves: suspend-reality, young-adult-lit, old-faces-new-tales, the-witching-hour, fairy-tales, underwater-creatures, kickass-ladies, make-it-blue

Midnight Pearls, by Debbie Vigui茅, is a retelling of Hans Christen Anderson's The Little Mermaid. Most of us know this fairy tale best from the Disney film, a drastically "cleaned-up" version of the original story. Vigui茅's retelling is a little closer to the folktale, but it's still missing quite a bit of blood and agony. Our title character is a mysterious girl named Pearl, who is described in a way that makes her sound like a shiny albino with giraffe legs. She and the Prince have been best f Midnight Pearls, by Debbie Vigui茅, is a retelling of Hans Christen Anderson's The Little Mermaid. Most of us know this fairy tale best from the Disney film, a drastically "cleaned-up" version of the original story. Vigui茅's retelling is a little closer to the folktale, but it's still missing quite a bit of blood and agony. Our title character is a mysterious girl named Pearl, who is described in a way that makes her sound like a shiny albino with giraffe legs. She and the Prince have been best friends since childhood, and they decide that the obvious next step is to get married. Luckily, two more mer-kin come ashore, a plot to overthrow the king arises, and Pearl discovers that she's really half fish--saving them both from realizing further down the road that they didn't really want to marry each other.

What I Liked:

- I did like that Vigui茅 was able to keep some of the original elements of the story (such as, the little mermaid does not get the prince), while still giving us a happy ending. Happy endings are nice, especially in literature geared towards young people.

- Finneas and Mary. I'd let them adopt me any day.

- Switching POVs. It made the multiple plot points easier to grasp.

What I Did Not Like:

- It's pretty firmly established that Pearl/Adriana will turn back into a mermaid if she goes into the ocean, so to get around that, Vigui茅 gives her an intense fear of the ocean. OK, fine. And the two times that she walks into the ocean, she does start to sprout scales and such. Fine. EXCEPT that when James' rowboat springs a leak and she swims to shore, she does NOT in fact turn into a mermaid. And as far as I can tell, this is never explained away.

- The villains are pretty one-dimensional. The Duke and Sir Robert are evil just for the sake of being evil (And their plot to usurp the throne is ridiculously complex--I never completely understood it.), and the Sea Witch's motivation was never clear. Again, just evil because evil. Which is not a good reason for being evil.

- The mer-prince is named after a leafy green. ...more

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