Exceptional Tales for Exceptional Kids
The Mermaid and the Simpleton by Barbara Leonie Picard
These fifteen original stories are cast in the enchanted mode of fairy tales but not necessarily in their redemptive mood. Several end sadly ever after, others rather wistfully, and still others unresolvedly; and one in particular, “Little Lady Margaret,” bears a strangely gothic touch—she weaves her image into a tapestry and when in trouble takes permanent refuge there. That wise horse named “Heart of the Wind” guides a pair of forbidden lovers to safety in a land of peace and equality. . . death; and “The Ivory Box” offers similar solace to an errant young merchant of means.
Goodness is more conventionally rewarded for this genre in the title story where a simpleton rescues an exhibited mermaid and she in turn rescues him from imprisonment, as well as in the pleasingly modest case of a village man who uses his well-earned “Three Wishes” to help three unfortunates and is granted fulfillment of his dreams besides. Humor graces the group only sparingly, the prose is undecorated, the morals implicit; the conceptions are imaginative, if evaporative, and for all their gossamer femininity not glib or tame. KIRKUS REVIEW
For readers age 11 and above.
“ONE DAY, while he was fishing in the sea, a fisherman caught a mermaid in his net.
He had thought that she was some kind of large fish, and had had a great struggle to drag her into his boat, urged on by the thought of the price at which so large a fish might sell. But at last, when he could look at his prize properly, he saw the mermaid lying at the bottom of his boat, entangled in the net, and still making vain attempts to free herself from its meshes.
“Well,” said the fisherman, “seventeen years have I worked at my trade, and never have I caught anything so strange.”
She raised tear-filled eyes to him. “I am a mermaid, please let me go. I am young and very frightened, please throw me back into the sea.””
