A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
Selkie
Nataly Gruender
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers.
That was……….interesting. Though to be honest I spent most of my time wanting to murder Owen, which is a fair thing to want because that dude needed to die. He could’ve just accepted that he had a weird ass wife and that this was entirely his fault, and moved on with his life. But no. Drag him into the sea and drown him. I will gladly watch him die. My heart does not bleed.
My vendetta against Owen began somewhere around April 1893, when a group of young (presumably teenage-equivalent) selkies came to the shores of a small fishing village in Scotland and removed their pelts, just to see what it was like to be human. This was inadvisable but not, in my opinion, punishable. Most of them made it back to safety without incident, but a young female named Quinn lost access to her pelt when it was stolen by Owen Melville, a human who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. Owen used the pelt to force Quinn to marry him, believing she would shower the village with blessings and guarantee his livelihood, but she instead rained constant misfortune upon him in the form of violent storms triggered by her emotions. The rest of the village turned against her in a heartbeat when her mannerisms proved offensive to more human sensibilities, and she in turn did nothing to try to make peace with either her captor or his neighbors. Known merely as “Owen’s wife,” she quickly became a pariah and a neverending source of nasty gossip.
Seven years later, we are needlessly informed that Quinn was abducted by Owen. Her kidnapping is for some reason summarized at the beginning of the first chapter, I guess in case we either skipped or didn’t understand the prologue. Either way, Quinn is still stuck in Owen’s house, having been unable to locate her pelt, and they have spent almost a decade making each other royally miserable. It’ll be a cold day in Hell before Owen Melville admits that he made a mistake, and he is also convinced that Quinn will murder him at sea if he sets her loose (the flip side of the stories he heard growing up), so he keeps her captive and stubbornly ignores her when she points out, quite rightly, that they hate each other. Over the years he has forced her to give birth to three children – Flora (6), Evie (5), and Oliver (4) – who thus far have exhibited no selkie traits. Flora and Evie attend the village school, but their mother’s so-called strangeness has rubbed off on them, and they are bullied by the other children. Though she provides minimal support and almost no comfort, Quinn does care for her children; however, her love for them is twisted with the abuse inflicted upon her by their father, and she tries to keep them from getting overly attached to her.
Freedom comes unexpectedly when the children stumble across the pelt and offer it to Quinn. After a mad, gossip-fueling dash through the very surprised village, she makes it to the sea just in time for Owen to see her putting on her pelt and escaping for good. Unfortunately, this is not the end of her dealings with Owen: she struggles to remember how to be a seal and cannot find her old herd, and her lingering feelings for her children lead to a terrifying encounter in which she just barely escapes a second time, this time with a harpoon through her flipper. Badly wounded, she takes shelter on a nearby island, which also plays host to a lighthouse, and reluctantly accepts shelter and medical care from the trio of lightkeepers stationed there: Finn MacArthur, one-armed after a nasty storm that wrecked his ship; James “Jamie” Donovan (not his real name), wanted for murder; and Tavis Murdoch (not her real name), also a murderer. The laxity of the lighthouse’s hiring practices notwithstanding, Quinn uneasily settles in with the staunch support of Tavis, whose real name turns out to be Maisie Garrow. The men don’t trust her much, but she and Maisie share a mutual attraction that gradually blooms into something deeper as they grow closer and closer.
Meanwhile, the unsinkable and wildly entitled Owen becomes obsessed with hunting Quinn down and either recapturing or killing her (not sure which, to be honest) because, in his mind, she owes him free babysitting services for the children he forced upon her??? And this is somehow the bare minimum – again, according to him – she can do, given that selkies don’t actually have the power to fill his fishing nets??? Do we see why I want to drown him??? Anyway, he finally manages to visit the lighthouse as part of a party of local men searching for a convicted murderer, and gets definitive proof of Quinn’s presence when he sees her pelt in Maisie’s bedroom. Though Maisie refuses his offer to buy it, everyone present knows that Owen will be back, and that the next visit might not be so peaceful. Unwilling to bring harm on the lightkeepers through the continual threat of Owen, Quinn confesses to MacArthur that she unintentionally summoned the storm that ended with his arm getting amputated, and, when he seemingly banishes her, also says goodbye to Maisie and Jamie. Learning that Quinn can influence the storms that have been plaguing the village for the last several years, Jamie coldly orders her to leave. Quinn tries to invite Maisie to join her, offering to turn her into a selkie, but ultimately is forced to flee, leaving Maisie in tears.
At loose ends, and with nothing more than a vague hint that the local seals might have made their way to the eastern coast of Scotland, Quinn decides to find her old herd, but is briefly diverted when her children somehow manage to draw her to the beach where Owen first captured her. Here she learns that Oliver has begun to develop webbed fingers, the only hint she has ever seen of selkie blood in her children. Though she is tempted to take him with her, she chooses not to rip him from the rest of his family, reasoning that he will be able to make his own decision in time. Once again she leaves her children, but this time she is able to share a quiet, emotional goodbye before she turns north and begins her journey anew. After some traveling and a tense conversation with a hungry kelpie completely out of its element, she realizes that the lightkeepers have become her new herd, and that she does not want to live a life without Maisie in it. She returns to the lighthouse just ahead of Owen and the inspectors, who are intent upon capturing Jamie, and calls up a storm that focuses mostly on Owen’s boat.
While Owen and his crew struggle to make land, Quinn reunites with her new herd and warns them of the inspectors. Faced with the all but certain knowledge of capture, Jamie admits that they are after him because he skipped his parole after serving time for killing his abusive father. (It was an accident. Mostly.) With time running down and the consequences of all of their choices rapidly bearing down on them, Quinn offers to take the lightkeepers from the island as selkies. Maisie and Jamie agree almost at once. MacArthur refuses, ignoring even the impassioned pleas of Jamie, who turns out to be his lover to absolutely nobody’s surprise. Against her own expectations, Quinn is able to trade her storm-brewing abilities for two new pelts. Their escape acquires a wrinkle when MacArthur finally joins them, but Quinn is able to divide one of the pelts between the two men, allowing them both to transform before they all take to the water together. Later, when the storm has cleared and the sea is calm, Owen looks down from the top of the lighthouse and sees a quartet of seals playing in the waves, barking with joy and hopefully flipping him the bird.
Most of what I know about selkies probably comes from Song of the Sea, so I went into this relatively blind and really loved the folklore aspect of the book. And I don’t know how obvious this is because I don’t think I’ve actually talked about it much on this blog, but I LOVE folklore. I am such a sucker for it. It gets me every time. In that respect, this book delivered a wild, splashing good time. Despite her captivity and her stint at the lighthouse, Quinn spends a decent amount of time in the sea and even interacts with other sea creatures (and one aquatic creature who is not actually supposed to be there), and she is drawn to the sea at all times. She isn’t always sure of what she wants, but the sea is a constant. I had thought that she was going to end up spending her life as a human with Maisie, and I had mixed feelings about that; however, while I also have mixed feelings about the extremely convenient let’s-turn-everyone-into-selkies resolution, I am pleased that she doesn’t have to sacrifice her own needs in order to pursue the life that she wants. I suppose time will tell if the other three ever feel a need to return to the human world. Something tells me that Maisie and Jamie, at least, will not: Jamie obviously is still wanted for murdering and parole-skipping, and nothing awaits Maisie beyond the dread certainty that, should her masculine disguise fail, she will either be arrested for the murder of her almost-rapist ex-fiancé or forced into marriage with another unsuitable man.
Thoughts on the ending: it’s nice that Quinn has some time apart to think about what she wants and why she wants it. (There seems to be a trend in my reading this year: those very questions formed the backbone of Brigands & Breadknives [Travis Baldree].) She doesn’t get to hustle Maisie into life as a selkie, which is also nice; once the seed is planted after the first offer, presumably Maisie is able to take a few days to think about it before she receives the second offer. I appreciate the inclusion of MacArthur and Jamie as well: after everything they did to help support Quinn, even if they sometimes did it reluctantly, it would’ve been really shitty to hop into the sea and leave them to deal with the human consequences. I thought maybe they’d get around the inspectors and escape to the mainland while the lighthouse was being searched, but that wouldn’t have been much of a solution because they would’ve had nowhere to go and they probably would’ve been caught sooner rather than later. On the other hand, I don’t care for the speed and convenience of the actual solution. Quinn does kick around the idea of turning her children into selkies and taking them with her – which actually I would’ve liked far better as a solution, because leaving them a second time and adopting three humans she met maybe a month ago feels a bit random – so it isn’t a concept that gets introduced at the very last moment, but it still slightly rubs me the wrong way. This is mostly because Quinn easily swaps her storm-calling emotions for the two pelts that make their escape possible. This isn’t necessarily to say that she doesn’t still have strong emotions that need dealing with, but it feels like she gets away with selling her greatest flaw without ever having to reckon with it. It feels too much like me “giving up” my cocktail mix of mental illnesses and trading them in for something I actually want, like, say, a bottomless Barnes & Noble gift card. Even if she does sort of learn to control it at the end, she never learns to keep the storms from forming altogether.
As for Quinn herself, she’s a bit of a hard sell. It seems like every time I run across an unpleasant protagonist I end up talking about Eleanor Oliphant, who remains possibly the best unpleasant protagonist I’ve ever encountered because she is still good company. I might not want to chill with her in real life, at least not before Raymond and his big, kind heart get their hands on her, but she’s entertaining and she’s funny and she’s so full of heart. This is a vibe that Quinn lacks, possibly understandably; she is, after all, a seal, and their situations are not even close to the same. And I’m actually on Quinn’s side in most respects, particularly in regards to the children, even as those sweet little muffins broke my heart. I can’t fault her for abandoning those children when she was repeatedly raped and impregnated against her own wishes. When one parent unilaterally decides that their desire for progeny is more important than the other parent’s bodily autonomy, the full responsibility for said progeny should fall solely upon the deciding parent, full stop. This is not negotiable. There is no earthly reason Quinn should be expected or forced to raise Owen’s children when Owen chose to conceive them without her full and enthusiastic consent, though I have to admit that the book would’ve gotten the full five stars if Quinn had chosen to turn the children into selkies, and if they had all then fucked off into the sunset, leaving Owen with nothing. I don’t think this would’ve been an unreasonable ending when the children don’t fit in with the rest of the village and are being actively indoctrinated with the whole adulthood = marriage + children bullshit that still exists today. I would like them, particularly the girls, to have another option.
While I do not blame Quinn for any of the decisions she made during her time in the village, and I certainly don’t blame her for keeping the children at arm’s length when she always had one foot out the door, her character was just slightly unmotivating, and it made it difficult to want to pick up the book and catch up with her. She isn’t an engaging character. Her personality is a flat “NO” from the time Owen meets her to the time she washes up on the shores of the lighthouse island, even if Maisie does soften her with kindness. I would attribute this flatness to her captivity if she were different as a seal, but she is not. If she ever reveals her original personality after she has some time to process everything, we will never see it. All I can see is that she tends towards blunt hostility more often than not, and she lacks the humor that would have made this more readable. When she first arrived at the lighthouse I thought she might offer to take over the kitchen duties that Maisie did not particularly enjoy in return for her bed and board, but she did not. She never offers any sort of assistance. The other characters are okay, except of course for Owen, may he burn in Hell. I liked Maisie; her kindness and warmth somewhat balance Quinn, and I am glad that they get to be together. I could never pin down Jamie (in terms of deciding whether I liked him or not), but I actually did love MacArthur fairly consistently as he gruffly supported Maisie’s gender reveal and, in the end, told Quinn that he didn’t hold her responsible for the loss of his arm.
Outside of the characters, the rest of the book is fine. The writing is serviceable, though Gruender’s use of the word “greeted” is making me think I did Chloe Gong a real disservice, but nothing special. (Also, “complied” is not a valid replacement for “said.”) The dialogue between Quinn and the lightkeepers randomly dips into therapyspeak at least once when MacArthur tells her that her casual and unintentional invalidation of his entire job (because he predicts storms and she just randomly calls them up) was a lot for him to process. As far as I can tell from Google, this is a use of the word “process” that did not appear until the later 1900s, and it smells a bit too modern for me to let it pass; however, I didn’t spend too much time looking and therapy is not my field of expertise, so take that with a grain of salt. Maybe it’s legit, maybe it’s not. I was initially disoriented by the lack of any sort of timekeeping mechanism because it was difficult to place where in history we were, though of course this makes perfect sense when Quinn is, again, a seal, and does not track time the way humans do. What is less clear is the reason for Quinn’s literacy, as she seems fully capable of reading English and I’m not sure why she would be. I can’t imagine her sitting quietly while Owen teaches her, and I can’t imagine any scenario in which she would have learned during her time as a seal. I can wave off her knowledge of human dates, given the time she spent as a human, but I can’t explain the literacy. I also have to wonder why she just happens to speak perfect English. If a transformed selkie can automatically speak to any nearby humans, does their inherent magic allow them to adopt any language? If she had washed up in Norway, would she come out of the sea speaking Norwegian? Or is it merely that she is descended from selkies who happened to inhabit the coasts of Scotland?
Overall, the book inspired neither revulsion nor wild devotion. The opening chapters were captivating as they traced Quinn’s capture and her dramatic escape, her life as an unwilling human and then her first time back in the sea in seven years, and they were in fact the deciding factor in my purchase of the book. But her story loses momentum almost the moment she meets Maisie, in spite of the tension and the ongoing threat of Owen, and it’s such a shame. I knew going in that the book was mostly going to be about Quinn’s journey to trusting humans again, or at least to trusting the lightkeepers, and that it would not, in fact, show Quinn reuniting with her herd and living her best life as a seal. Even so, I didn’t anticipate the ennui that accompanied her arrival on the island. She can reasonably be assumed to be on her way to living her best life with her new herd in tow, but the time she spends at the lighthouse is somewhat dissatisfying, which is a real surprise when I actually love lighthouses. Yet even with my general dissatisfaction, I don’t feel the need to unhaul the book. I might be slightly biased in the book’s favor – it was my birthday book, i.e., the book I decided I was allowed to buy for my birthday – but I will read it again the next time I get bitten by the folklore bug. Maybe next time I’ll even figure out how to teach a seal to read.
