Read for the Once Upon a Time IV Reading Challenge.
Peri has lost both her parents to the Sea – her father when he left one morning in his fishing boat, and her mother, because she has never stopped waiting for Peri’s father to come home, and no longer lives in quite the same world as Peri. That’s when Peri decides to use what little magic she knows to hex the Sea. This simple little charm brings the sons of the king into her life, and much more magic than she ever dreamed of.
I don’t have a new way to describe how much I love reading McKillip’s words. She has an amazing ability to describe beauty in everyday moments, and this book is no exception to that. Better yet, this is the book about the sea I was expecting in McKillip’s Something Rich and Strange, and had been a bit disappointed not to find. This story about the sea captures everything I love about the ocean, the creatures, the mercurial nature of the waves, the colors of sky above. And though it’s both a love story and a fairy tale, it’s not a slave to those conventions, and manages to be surprising until the very end. It’s a lovely little book, and I could read it again and again.