The Little Mermaid by Laura Barella

The Little Mermaid by Laura Barella
Buy The Little Mermaid by Laura Barella at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: For Sharing
Reviewer: Ruth Ng
Summary: A nice retelling of the famous fairy tale complete with lift the flap fun!
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 24	Date: October 2009
Publisher: Child's Play International
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1846433252
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I've always found the story of the Little Mermaid to be a rather strange choice for a toddler's picture book since it doesn't have the expected happy ending. Of course that means that usually the ending gets altered, to make it palatable for little ones. This particular retelling for younger children is unusual as it steers clear of a romantic happy ending in Disney-style and actually ends on quite a solemn, sad note.

The Little Mermaid wishes to go up onto the land after rescuing a boy, the Prince, from drowning. She visits the sea witch (who looks like a kind old lady rather than a scary witch!) and is given legs. The witch tells her, however, that if she changes her mind she can never have her tail back. She finds the Prince when she gets to the land and goes to live with him in his palace. She isn't mute, since her new legs didn't come as part of a deal in exchange for her voice, but she finds that living on land she is unhappy and misses the sea.

The mermaid decides to leave the boy and his palace and returns to the sea, although now she doesn't have a tail so must swim using her legs instead and is much slower than she used to be. Sometimes she feels lonely still, and she goes back, near the shore, to look at the land. And sometimes the Prince can be seen walking along the beach by himself and he will stop and gaze out to sea.

This isn't quite the ending that the original story has, but it has the same rather sad feeling about it. I liked that this retelling doesn't cave in to a happy ending, although if you read it alongside a run of other fairytale stories it can seem a little odd that the final picture has the mermaid and the Prince gazing at each other, both feeling lonely and sad.

There are lots of flaps to lift, which makes it a fun read for little ones. They're all quite large so easy to get hold of and lift up. There aren't any clever surprises under any of them which was a shame, and most have the image you'd expect behind the flap. There was one that made us laugh which is a flap in the Prince's palace behind which there's the most enormous cake being lugged into the room by two people!

I suspect some readers may not like the sombre ending but my four year old (who is a Disney geek!) accepted it without question and only commented on the fact that it was sad that the mermaid couldn't spend sometime with the Prince and some time in the sea. A nice book to share.

I'd like to thank the publishers for sending a copy to the Bookbag.

Further reading suggestion: For more fairy tale delights try The Orchard Book Of Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales by Martin Waddell and Emma Chichester Clark.

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