The Mermaid of Black Conch (Monique Roffey)

Costa Book of the Year, 2020

I’m not convinced about the Book of the Year decision, but Roffey is a bit of a literary anomaly and, therefore, interesting. A white Caribbean woman writing mostly Black characters? Sure, I’ll read that (in a more-than-critical way, though).

And Roffey does write about her fictitious island from an insider’s perspective – the sea, the weather, the boats, the way the jungle is reclaiming the once-grand homes of colonizers. Roffey was born in Trinidad and has received a number of awards for Caribbean writers so her credentials are not in dispute. But I’m telling you my opinion, right?! And I spent a month in Martinique after high school, so I’m in a position to judge, right?! So I’ll just say that in a year when I was pining for the beach, for somewhere consistently warm, I was transported to a real tropical island in all its humid, buggy, fish-smelling, overgrown glory. It wasn’t a vacation, it was a travel experience.

Setting, check. Five stars on Trip Advisor.

The same could be said for the logistics of the story – we talked about this in my book group. Aycayia, the mermaid, is in possession of a giant, muscular tail (she’s been swimming the oceans for a thousand years, after all). She loses it in ways that aren’t the least bit Disney and (spoiler alert!) regrows it as you’d imagine only an actual, cursed, half-amphibian could do.

So, marine biology – check.

But things start to fall apart (even more messily than Aycayia’s tail) when it comes to the story itself. One of the guys in the book group, a screenwriter, pointed out that this was, essentially, an E.T. retelling – and, holy shit. Aside from the obvious ways that MoBC follows the Hans Christian Anderson version of The Little Mermaid (and minus the Reese’s Pieces) it really, really is.

If you like that kind of thing, then maybe this is the book for you. Mean women cursed the pretty girl and she lost her voice and the nice land people helped her get it back. Tale as old as time.

There was so much potential to make this less superficial, but the relationships among the women never get more nuanced than that. So much competition for the attention of men. One line saying that women hate each other (this, on top of the mean things that the mean men do to our pretty girl). A glib rendering of men who sire children and then keep it moving. The fretful white woman in the crumbling house on the hill. It’s a short book but I would have budgeted for another fifty pages that dug into these relationships and relied less on stereotypes.

Growing up in Georgia I’ve been around Black people. I’ve worked alongside Black people in the Army, and in East Baltimore, so I’m in a position to judge that, too! (And Black readers – I hear you laughing to yourself like, lady – we let you see and know only the things we wanted you to see and know, and I get that. I thank you for the gifts I’ve received. You’re right to keep your valuables locked up and count the silver after the marauders have come through).

I am desperate for more books where knowledgeable white people talk about race. Where women dig into our relationships with each other. Where men acknowledge the shitty things they do to women and how toxic they are around each other. This one, unfortunately, missed an opportunity.